Sarnia will move forward with a community infrastructure and housing accelerator application without some lands targeted for urban boundary expansion in Bright’s Grove.
But it may not matter, city community services general manager Stacey Forfar said.
“There’s been fundamental changes proposed to the Planning Act and the planning statement of the province,” she said, adding “one of the proposals is that municipal governments may potentially have the right to do their own boundary expansion.”
Which would “basically negate this entire process” of council wanting to expand its urban boundary in Bright’s Grove, but being told they can’t because of an existing provincial policy statement that requires instead considering first rezoning some of the city’s hundreds of hectares of industrial and commercial land for residential expansion, Forfar said.
The city has been looking to use the provincial community infrastructure and housing accelerator (CIHA) tool to appeal to Lambton County rejecting Sarnia’s official plan proposalbased on the current provincial policy statement.
One property owner in the proposed 215-hectare expansion parcel, including environmentally sensitive parts that would have to be parceled out before building, wasn’t on board with paying the $16,000 fee to join the process, Forfar has said.
So the city will continue it’s CIHA application without those lands, council decided 5-4 earlier this month.
“It’s not really great, because you’re going to wind up with breaks and pieces in the development fabric, which will be a challenge,” Forfar said. “It is what it is.”
Final provincial policy statement change approvals are expected this fall, Forfar said.
Mayor Mike Bradley broke the tie to move ahead with the CIHA application “because it moves (the appeal process) forward to some degree,” he said.
“But I also believe in the end it’ll be out of our control anyhow, with what the province is going to do to us.”
A draft zoning bylaw will be prepared for public consultation, council decided.
Discussion at the July 10 council meeting suggested council was considering a CIHA application for the entire area, regardless of whether property owners had paid.
That move would be somewhat inequitable, considering some would have paid and others wouldn’t have, Forfar said.
But city officials later confirmed the motion passed was to exclude the areas that hadn’t paid.