After a pretty light January, the first week of February brought a couple of packed agendas to the council’s agenda management software on their iPads. First, Committee of the Whole contained an unexpected report about the Housing Accelerator Funds, plus some grand plans about downtown. Also, there was a field trip to the east end of town for a special council workshop about the proverbial Cadillac of City services: waste management.
Committee of the Whole Meeting – February 6
The first Committee of the Whole meeting of the year almost had something for everyone right from the beginning. The Chief Administrative Officer laid out the strategic objectives for the year, and there were a lot of honours recognized, including the City’s status as one of the best employers in the region. Staff were also recognized for their successful application to the Housing Accelerator Fund, which gets us into the first big presentation of the day.
You may be asking yourself, what is this funding supposed to accomplish? Good question! Put simply, it’s an eight-part initiative meant to get 739 additional units over and above what Guelph typically builds in a year over the next three years.
The initiatives are split between three goals: Policy Enhancements, Process Enhancements, and Housing-enabling Infrastructure Design. Policy means updating the Affordable Housing Strategy, unlocking lands for development, and finding ways to encourage missing middle housing and accessory units; Process means finding ways to fast-track applications, reducing timelines, and increasing predictability; and Infrastructure means focusing on making two specific areas ready to build, and those are the downtown and the Guelph Innovation District lands.
Staff will be developing a communications strategy to make people aware of the initiatives as they roll out and the City will have a dedicated website to that effort including short videos that explain the goals and projects under each of those three areas.
Moving on to the rest of committee business, the consent agenda for Governance and Corporate were quickly dispatched, and so was the Financial Plan for Water and Wastewater Services.
That brought us to the next major piece of business, the Payment-in-lieu (PiL) of Parking Policy, which came out of the Downtown Parking Master last fall. Essentially, any developer looking to reduce its parking burden will be encouraged to apply Transportation Demand Management measures to reduce overall parking requirements for the site, and then, using the cost of a parking space as $60,000, the developer will pay between $7,500 and $54,000 for each space they don’t build into the project.
There was no staff presentation, but there were two delegates. The first was Bookshelf co-founder Doug Minett who cited a marketing study done by his store to show how important parking is to commerce in the core, and the other was Chris Greyson-Gaito from the Guelph Coalition for Active Transportation who wanted to push for bringing fewer cars into the core to promote active transportation.
When the debate came back to council, much of the discussion was about how the funds from the PiL was going to be spent, and how staff will be monitoring parking demand in the core to make sure they have enough parking to meet the need. DCAO of Infrastructure, Development and Environment Services Jayne Holmes said that staff will be careful monitoring the situation, because there’s also the goals of the Transportation Master Plan to consider, which includes encouraging people to make a modal shift away from the personal automobile. There will be annual reporting examining the impact of the policy.
Mayor Cam Guthrie probed staff to make sure that they weren’t throwing up any barriers to developers so that projects can get going faster, and then he proposed the idea to change the parking ratio, which staff dissuaded him from pursuing. The PiL was a matter of policy while the parking ratio is a matter of zoning and bylaw, and since both the new Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw and the Downtown Parking Master Plan are under appeal at the Ontario Land Tribunal, there would be no immediate change.
Guthrie then proposed a motion to assign 100 per cent of the funds collected from the PiL to support future Guelph Transit enhancements, but staff cautioned that the Planning Act is clear about what the money can be used for, so there may be some rules barring this. Guthrie removed the motion and said that he would “hold his nose” and support the recommendations. Whether holding their nose or not, the rest of council followed suit, except for Councillor Christine Billings who voted against the first clause that approved the PiL.
The last item was the approval of the environmental assessment for Wyndham Street North Cross Section and St George’s Square Intersection. In brief, the EA calls for “Two-lanes with Uni-Directional Bike Path” plus parallel parking for the street, and an intersection that more or less looks the same as it does right now (aka: no Traffic Circle) for the Square. Streetscaping and beautification is a topic reserved for a special workshop meeting in April, the point here was to consider the basic set-up of the street once the pipes and infrastructure are replaced underground. Construction is not expected to start until 2026.
There were six delegations for this item, most of them from GCAT, almost all of them in favour of the direction for Upper Wyndham and St. George’s Square. The committee offered their support too and tried to avoid any commentary on some of that work coming up in April. Mostly, there was agreement that the plan provided the right kind of flexibility to balance car traffic and pedestrian space and the recommendations were approved unanimously.
Click here to see the complete recap of the meeting.
Workshop Meeting of City Council – February 7
Last night, council took a field trip to the Waste Innovation Resource Centre to learn a bit more about the changes coming to the City’s waste collection. Across the province, municipalities are transitioning to a producer-responsible model for recycling, which will mean that what goes into the blue box/bin will be more uniform across Ontario, and that more things will count towards recycling than what’s presently covered in Guelph’s own blue box program.
There are still a number of things to sort out including the downtown waste collection, because only residential pick-up is covered by this model, not commercial, and there’s also changes coming for staff and City assets and buildings that need to be accounted for. Yes, there will be cost savings for the City, but they have already been factored into the multi-year budget but at least a couple of councillors felt like part of the upcoming communications strategy should involve telling ratepayers how much this new model is saving them.
Councillors also had questions about Circular Materials, the company contracted to handle recyclables from the City when the transition begins this coming January. They’re a non-profit created by the consortium of producers, a group whose membership includes every company that makes and packages things sold in Ontario stores, to handle the collection of recyclables, and no, they can’t just turn around and dump our recyclables, they have to meet their targets and they will be monitored. Staff also said that it will be in the producers’ best interest to innovate because now they’re responsible for the whole lifecycle of the products they sell.
After the presentation council, staff and the media were taken on a brief tour of the centre before adjourning for the night. There are videos on the Twitter thread for this meeting (starting here) if you want to check them out.
Click here to see the complete recap of the meeting.
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