Council and staff deserve unqualified praise for the way you handled this contentious application. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, the process is more important than the result. And the process here was admirable.
Given OPA#29, for the reasons succinctly delineated by the mayor, staff really had no choice but to approve this application, and one can hardly fault the developer for relying on the current state of the law.
Council’s hard, persistent questioning of staff, the developer, and the developer’s experts was beautiful to watch—serious planning politics at its very best. I understand several of you went into that meeting uncertain how you would vote, so your ultimate decisions were apparently shaped by this solid, fact-oriented, no-nonsense give and take.
Despite the partisan twitting in the gallery, I believe all of us there were deeply impressed by the fact that every single councilor give rational, straightforward explanations for your vote. We have, of course, come to expect this from council, but still it is impressive to see such mutual respect around the horseshoe on such a touchy issue with such a long, divisive history in Guelph.
Bravo!
Council also deserves praise, in my opinion, for your collective, quiet decision to move forward with the deck you inherited, refusing to vindictively undue that work of the previous council with which you might disagree. Very wise, very mature; and again I say Bravo!
However, perhaps your own reflective, probing post-mortem on what happened last night will lead you to question whether you can, in the longer term, really continue to live with OPA #29?
I suggest it would not be hard to find a battery of planners who would argue that OPA #29 is fully in conformity with provincial planning dictates, and that it would equally be easy to find a second battery of professional planners to argue that OPA #29 is incompatible with the deeper intent of those same provincial dictates.
Yet somehow I don’t think directly positing the question of “conformity” gets at the real issue.
Abstracting from all the detail, the heart and soul of OPA #29 is the proposition that market forces should determine commercial development in the four giant nodes that amendment governs. As you visualize actualizing your mandated responsibility to redirect the thrust of development in Guelph, do you have sufficient faith in market forces to let them do that aspect of your job for you? And if your personal answer is “Yes,” do you additionally believe those forces will work quickly enough to meet the province’s timeline?
I suggest that those of you who voted against the application last night, were really voting against OPA #29, either directly or implicitly. If you voted against the application because of the developer/retailer’s reluctance to comply with the city’s desires (such as rain water harvesting, environmental certification, partial two-stories) then, I would argue, you implicitly voted against OPA #29 because that amendment effectively removed all the teeth you would otherwise have had to compel compliance. Crassly, the free market does not give a damn what council may think about any of those things.
Despite the wisdom of moving forward from the deck you were dealt by the previous council, perhaps OPA # 29 is just too big and too powerful and too wild an elephant to ignore? DG