Your holiday gift? These are the last two city council meetings of 2023! This business is not unimportant and begins with a bit of unusual scheduling, the regular meeting of city council. After that, council will hold the monthly planning meeting, which will feature two decision reports and a new application. After that, we’ll get the biggest gift all: Three weeks off before the next city council meeting!
NOTE #1: Delegates will be able to appear at this meeting in-person or via tele-presense but you do have to register with the clerks office before 10 am on Friday December 8. You can also submit written delegations and correspondences for agenda items.
NOTE #2: In addition to meeting in-person, this meeting will also be live-streamed on the City of Guelph’s website here.
NOTE #3: The regular meeting will take place at the special time 5 pm and will be followed by December’s planning meeting at 6:30 pm.
MEETING #1: Regular Council Meeting
CLOSED MEETING:
Council will discuss the Chief Administrative Officer’s Performance Evaluation for 2023, which requires that they meet in-camera under Section 239(2)(b) and (d) of the Municipal Act, as it’s related to “personal matters about an identifiable individual, including municipal or local board employees, and labour relations or employee negotiations.”
RECOGNITIONS:
1) Marva Wisdom will be recognized for being a recent recipient of the Order of Ontario.
2) The BeaverworX team from Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School will be saluted for being the 2023 First Robotics World Championship Winners.
Implementing Service Simplified Guelph’s Customer Service Strategy – As you may know, the City of Guelph is the process of upgrading their customer services processes, and this report outlines their progress in the last year and the next phase of progress in the next. In 2023, the City made Good Service Standards part of employee evaluations, centralized more services, and the created a digital services portal for property taxes. For 2024, staff are in the process of reviewing which of the Parks Department’s 30 different service activities can be delivered through ServiceGuelph.
SEE THE COMPLETE AGENDA ON THE CITY OF GUELPH WEBSITE HERE.
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MEETING #2: Planing Meeting of Council
State of Housing in Guelph: Housing Affordability Strategy Update – This report looks at the various housing needs in Guelph, as well as the drivers of unaffordability when it comes to housing in the city. First, the new affordability benchmarks; in 2023 the affordable price to buy a house is approximately $429,016 per dwelling, and an affordable rental unit is $1,434 per month.
At issue is the fact one-person households are the fastest growing portion of the housing market, and while the city is making great progress in creating new apartments, still 52 per cent of Guelph’s housing stock is single detached dwellings. Adding to the difficulty for renters though is that the private rental rate has increased by 27 per cent between 2018 and 2022, which is more than twice the inflation rate of the Consumer Price Index.
There are no recommendations with this report and council will only vote to receive it for information. Next steps include public engagement on creating a zoning bylaw amendment to allow fourplexes, which will come back in the spring, and the development of a recommended draft for the next version of the Housing Affordability Strategy will continue and come back to council sometime in the third quarter of next year.
Decision Report 331 Clair Road East, Zoning By-law Amendment File OZS23-007 – Presented at October’s planning meeting, this project will see the construction of eight stacked townhouse blocks, containing a total of 136 units plus the preservation old James Hanlon Farmhouse for common amenity space in the middle of the property. Staff recommend that this project should get approval from council.
Decision Report 55 Baker St., 152 and 160 Wyndham St. N Proposed ZBA File OZS23-008 – This is the first phase of the residential development on Baker Street, and as reported at the October meeting, that means two proposed 15-storey towers with 353 residential units between them and 529 square metres of commercial space on the ground level. Staff are recommending that council approve this project too.
Statutory Public Meeting and Decision Report 27 and 35 Janefield Avenue ZBA File OZS23-010 – Presently these are two properties and they each have a house on them, but only one house will survive. The plan is to also build six new semi-detached dwellings on the rest of the property. This is the public meeting for this application and no formal decisions about the project will be made. Council will only receive this report for information.
Guelph Politico 