Mayor supports smaller urban boundary after provincial U-turn

Ottawa has just weeks to decide whether it wants to keep any of the changes the province made to the city's top planning document last year, but Mayor Mark Sutcliffe wants the urban boundary to revert back to council's original plan.

"I want to work with staff and work with councillors and hear what everyone has to say, but with regard to the urban boundary in particular, I'm prepared to accept the official plan that council approved and move on from there," Sutcliffe said in a news conference Wednesday.

The official plan is the city's overarching planning document that sets broad policies and dictates, at a high level, where development and infrastructure will go over the next 25 years. It sets an urban boundary to channel growth toward certain areas.

When councillors passed the latest version, in 2021, they expanded that boundary by nearly 1,300 hectares.

But that wasn't enough for the province's former municipal affairs and housing minister, Steve Clark, who overruled the city to add 654 hectares more in 2022.

Clark resigned last month in the wake of blistering auditor general and integrity commissioner reports on his decision to add lands to the GTA's Greenbelt. MPPs and city councillors drew parallels with his decision to expand Ottawa's urban boundary, especially in light of a CBC report that donors to the Progressive Conservatives bought lands near Orléans shortly beforehand.

Clark's successor, Paul Calandra, announced Monday the provincial government will reverse changes Clark made for several cities, including Ottawa. That means Ottawa's official plan would revert back to what it was when council passed it in 2021.

Calandra gave cities 45 days to decide whether they want to make any revisions to their plans, including retaining any of the provincial changes.

City staff said they've put a year of work into planning under the expanded boundaries. That includes an infrastructure master plan coming to committee next week that includes water and wastewater projects to service the now-removed lands. That will now have to be amended.

"It was an unexpected announcement on Monday," said general manager of planning, real estate and economic development Don Herweyer, who said he will meet with Calandra's staff in the coming days to seek more clarity.

"Certainly there has been a fair amount of work over the past year based on the official plan that was approved by the minister," he added. "It impacts a lot of work."

While Sutcliffe came out against retaining the expanded urban boundary, he said there are other details that will require a closer look.

"There's a lot of detail that we need to go through because it's not just the urban boundary that's affected by the changes," he said. "There are policy decisions and other things that were in the official plan, so we have to go through those one by one and make sure we're comfortable with them."

Notably, one of the provincial changes from last year increased height limits along minor corridors, bumping them up from four to nine storeys downtown, and six elsewhere within the Greenbelt.