This Week at Council: One and Done For January

It’s a slow start for 2024, at least if your jam is the business of Guelph City Council. At the one and only meeting for January, your friends around the horseshoe handled some very particular business in closed session and then quickly dispatched three piece of business in the open session. There was some discussion about the new development charges bylaw, and whether growth pays for itself, so it may be a new year, but we’ve still got the same problems. Here’s the recap…

Planning Meeting of City Council – January 16

A slow start to the new year, January’s one and only council meeting began with a marathon closed session that was nearly two hours long and had some pretty big implications once the horseshoe came back into the open. Matters at the Ontario Land Tribunal about plans for 140 Hadati Road and 78-82 Eastview Road apparently only saw council give staff direction, and then there was the third item.

On the item called “Downtown Construction, Encampments and Public Space Use Bylaw”, Mayor Cam Guthrie said that council and staff had a discussion getting legal and “other” advice. He also said that council wanted to be “open and transparent” by putting a motion on the floor, and that motion directed staff to draft a Public Space Use Bylaw to address safety concerns regarding encampments on lands owned by the City.

“By clearly outlining guidelines for public space use with a bylaw like this, we’ll be better equipped to help address safety concerns for those who may be living in encampment settings and everyone who uses our public spaces,” said CAO Scott Stewart in a media release posted yesterday. “Safety for everyone, regardless of their situation, is key, and this bylaw will be another tool in our belt as we work to help achieve that.”

The motion was tabled by Councillors Rodrigo Goller and Michele Richardson, and directs staff to bring a draft bylaw back to council for a special meeting on February 14, which will include time for delegations. That feedback will be used to adjust the draft bylaw before it comes back for final approval at the February 27 council meeting. The motion was approved unanimously.

The rest of the meeting was pretty straightforward. Council approved the new development for 151 Bristol Street and a correction to the minutes from an October meeting on consent. That just left the new Development Charge background study and bylaw, and there was really no additional information from staff to discuss. There was, however, a delegation.

Susan Watson, arriving just in the nick of time, was able to offer her two cents by again making the point that even with the new DCs, growth doesn’t pay for itself and that recent provincial actions have been a “windfall” for developers while offering nothing to help residents get cheaper housing. When asked by Councillor Dominique O’Rourke in a follow-up question, Watson did concede that the City is chasing as much development fee money as it can given provincial restrictions.

That was confirmed by Byron Tan from Watson and Associations, one of the consultants working on the DC study, who agreed with that assessment and noted that since the 1990s there have been a number of changes that have reduced the amount of DCs available to collect. Plus, the City can only collect DCs for 20 different services, and the numbers will change depending on the type of build; if everything is single detached housing, numbers won’t change, but more density comes with more exemptions.

Tan was asked about the impact of changes announced to Bill 23 before the holidays on the new DC bylaw. He explained that they will have to look at the new definitions, mandatory phase-in period and eligibility of studies, but the bylaw is meant to automatically adapt to most of those changes. General Manger of Finance Tara Baker noted that the entire process is very prescriptive, so there’s not a lot of opportunity to make a DC bylaw locally bespoke. Having said that, staff did confirm that the DC bylaw can be revisited anytime.

The new bylaw was approved unanimously and goes into effect March 2.

Click here to see the complete recap of the meeting.