Details

Written by Gordon Prentice

Published: 08 April 2014

Yesterday, Newmarket’s Committee of the Whole held an in camera session to decide where to go now.

The Glenway Preservation Association has worked heroically for the neighbourhood but has now run out of cash. They have let their lawyer and planner go and will rely on the Town to argue their case for them. My understanding is that the GPA have stepped back and say it is now a matter for the Town.

To recap. On 27 March, the OMB in the shape of Susan Schiller ruled that development is not prohibited on the Glenway lands. The precise nature of what might be acceptable and appropriate would be dealt with in Phase 2 of the OMB Hearing scheduled to start later this month.

There are two options open to the Council.

(1) The first is to abandon Phase 2 and seek a negotiated settlement with Marianneville. Councillors supporting this line of action will cite cost savings. This would be short sighted.

Marianneville is likely to play hard ball. They will want to make as much money as they can from their development and may be unwilling to cut significantly the number of residential units planned (730).

(2) The second option is to carry through with Phase 2, examining in detail the technical issues – the location of the roads and storm water ponds, the so-called “built form” and its compatibility with what is already there, and so on and so forth.

With this option everything is out in the open. Witness lists and witness statements (from both sides, the Town and Marianneville) should be made available to the public. Similarly, the “issues list” should be published showing everyone what is still in contention.

My spies tell me that the Town’s external consultant, Ruth Victor, who was hired to work on the Glenway file, has pretty much resolved the technical issues with Marianneville so there may not be much to talk about. If this is indeed the case the Hearing will be that much shorter.

People in Glenway are already spitting tacks over the OMB decision on the principle of development. They now know that all those well meaning and reassuring statements in the Town’s Official Plan about protecting stable residential areas are not worth the paper they are written on.

But for the Town to stitch up a negotiated settlement with Marianneville, in camera, away from the public gaze, adds insult to injury.

I suspect a clear majority of councillors want to cut a deal with Marianneville, no doubt advised by the same phalanx of “experts” and fifth columnists who got us here in the first place.

I hope I am wrong. 

A public debate at the OMB on the nature of development at Glenway is a million times better than a deal cooked up behind closed doors. 

Details

Written by Gordon Prentice

Published: 03 April 2014

During the recent Glenway OMB Hearing, Marianneville’s theatrical lawyer, Ira Kagan, made much of the fact that a big chunk of Glenway was within 500 metres of the GO Bus Station and was, by that fact alone, according to various planning policies, ripe for intensification.

On 21 March in giving evidence, the GPA’s planning expert, Nick McDonald, countered by claiming (correctly) the Town had not identified major transit areas and more work still had to be done.

A Town-led study of the Glenway lands should include the GO Bus station which, he ventured, could possibly be relocated.

This heresy was enough to persuade Kagan to launch a blistering attack on McDonald in his closing submission on 27 March:

“When, through cross-examination, McDonald was asked to drill down and identify which other lands (beyond the Marianneville lands) he would recommend be part of the Town-led study, he advised he would include both the existing GO Transit bus terminal and the Upper Canada Mall but in both cases solely to determine whether or not to relocate the GO Transit bus terminal. This is simply not reasonable.

“There is not a shred of evidence that the Town, Region or GO Transit want to move this bus terminal. This terminal is identified in a variety of planning documents that the various witnesses reviewed and never once was it identified for relocation. Mr McDonald may think it should move but no-one else seems to agree with him. Even the ongoing OPA 10 study (ie the Draft Secondary Plan for Newmarket’s Urban Centre) is not proposing that the GO transit bus terminal be relocated. Accordingly, the addition of these two parcels to a Town-led study is not supported on the evidence.

It is not so black and white. A future study referred to in the Town’s Draft Secondary Plan, now out for consultation, could make recommendations impacting on the GO bus station.

On page 59 of the Draft Secondary Plan we read that Newmarket will encourage Metrolinx to partner with the Town, Region and others “to prepare a Mobility Hub Area Station Plan for the area around Newmarket GO Rail Station” which would look at, amongst other things,

“integration between the GO Rail Station, the Rapidway, the future GO bus services and the GO bus terminal.”

The draft says:

“An amendment to this Plan may be necessary in order to incorporate relevant findings or directions from the Mobility Hub Station Area Plan.”

Yesterday (2 April) Phase 2 of the Urban Centres Transportation Study, prepared by Consultants GDH for the Town, was posted on the Town’s website. References to this study can be found in the first version of the Draft Secondary Plan published in September 2013. It has been around for ages but it has only now been put into the public domain.

On page 10 of the dense 360 page tome (Section 2.4 York Region Transit), we find this:

Based on consultations with GO/Metrolinx throughout the course of this study, the current vision for the existing GO Transit / YRT bus terminal south of Upper Canada Mall is to remain in its current location. However, it is expected that YRT will gradually supplant GO Transit bus routes, which will be relocated outside of the Secondary Plan area to the East Gwillimbury GO Transit station, and/or the Bradford GO Transit rail station.

The planned Viva Blue (Yonge Street) and Viva Yellow (Davis Drive) bus routes include one-way loops via Eagle Street, Davis Drive and Yonge Street. These routes will likely contribute to additional congestion at some locations, such as the Yonge and Eagle Street intersection due to high pedestrian activity. However, should the bus station be relocated to the UCM site, the volume of associated buses should not significantly impact future operations compared to leaving the station in its current location. Furthermore, the relocation of the bus station to the UCM property may even serve to reduce future net effects, given potential reductions to pedestrian crossings of Davis Drive. The impact of such a change in operations has not been specifically modeled in our study, so any bus station relocation should include an evaluation of localized transportation impacts and requirements.

It seems to me, m’lud, that consideration has, indeed, been given to relocating the bus station if only to conclude that, for the moment, it is not part of the “current vision”.

But why isn’t it part of the “current vision”? Can we have the detailed reasons?

Could relocation be part of an emerging but still indistinct “future vision”?

I think we should be told.

Details

Written by Gordon Prentice

Published: 31 March 2014

As I tap this out, Newmarket’s Committee of the Whole is meeting in camera to consider its next steps now that the Ontario Municipal Board has ruled that some kind of development can take place in Glenway – provided it fits in with what is already there. (And is in conformity with every imaginable plan, statement and policy deemed relevant by the OMB adjudicator).

The Town’s Solicitor, Esther Armchuk, updates councillors on the OMB’s oral decision. She says the full written decision must await the conclusion of Phase 2 of the Hearing.

Sitting in front of me is Marianneville's lawyer, Ira Kagan. He is casually dressed, wearing an open necked shirt and with a straw in his mouth but he is not off duty. He is flanked by the ever present VP of Marianneville Developments and another woman who is tapping furiously on a keyboard.

Mediation

Chris Emanuel raises the possibility of mediation to settle the Glenway imbroglio. This would avoid the necessity of a Phase 2 OMB Hearing. (This had been anticipated by an earlier decision of Council some months ago.) Without taking a view one way or the other, he flags this up for discussion at next Monday’s Committee of the Whole.

Now everyone is thanking everyone else. The GPA chair, Christina Bisanz, thanks the Council. The Mayor thanks the GPA.

Our councillors have their say but are circumspect. They are about to go into closed session where they will get the benefit of professional advice on what to do next. 

Now there is a prolonged exchange on how the planning system recognises public and private open space and whether the Town should have bought the privately-owned Glenway lands when they were first put up for sale. This is interesting but tangential.

Chris Emanuel hopes the Planning Department is doing a report on “lessons learned”.

John Taylor laments the decision saying we put forward the strongest arguments we could. (No we didn’t.)

Dave Kerwin bites his bottom lip. He wants to save his comments for the private session. He concedes “the GPA fought a noble battle.”

Progressive Conservative MPP hopeful, Jane Twinney, sees the Glenway OMB decision as ammunition for an assault on the Province and its planning regime.

Maddie Di Muccio wants to know if, at any stage, the Town considered buying the Glenway lands. She doesn’t get an answer.

Joe Sponga is upset about something or other.

Tom Hempen squeezes in a comment seconds before the Mayor moves into private session. I can’t immediately recall what it was about.

Who is advising whom?

What happens next is rich in irony. As the GPA and the public are asked to leave the Council Chamber, I reflect on who is staying behind to advise our councillors. The Town’s top planners – who were all completely absent from the entirety of the OMB Hearing. The Town’s counsel Mary Bull – who was manifestly not on top of her brief. And Ruth Victor, who gave damning evidence against the Town’s position on Phase 1, and who will be presenting the Town’s case on Phase 2 (which deals with the technicalities of shoe-horning hundreds of new homes into the middle of a stable, long established, residential community).

The Town’s position is clear from the 25 November 2013 unanimous vote at Newmarket Theatre. The Town does not support development of Glenway, as proposed.

It must now do everything in its power to frustrate the Marianneville proposals and prevent them from becoming reality. Mediation is absolutely not the solution.

In her report to Council, the Town’s external consultant in charge of the Glenway file, Ruth Victor, recommended refusal of the Marianneville proposals “because of substantial unresolved technical issues”.

These “substantial” technical issues must now become insuperable.

The Town’s Director of Planning, Rick Nethery, must now appear at the OMB Phase 2 Hearing to argue the case for refusing the Marianneville application on technical grounds.

There are servicing allocation issues. Why should Glenway get preference over other developments in the Town’s intensification priority areas?

What about standards for infill lots?

What about new parkland and its location? Glenway is a lung for a huge part of urban Newmarket. Where are all the new residents in Newmarket going to find and enjoy open space?

What about the traffic impact of the proposed development?

I am not a highly paid planner but even I could come up with a thousand good reasons why concrete should not be laid over the putting greens and fairways of Glenway.

I want to see Rick Nethery, our top planning expert, tell the OMB there are a million and one sound planning reasons why the Marianneville development should not get off the drawing board.

After all, Marianneville doesn’t pay his salary. We do.

Details

Written by Gordon Prentice

Published: 28 March 2014

The OMB decision to allow some kind of development in Glenway will come as a shattering blow to the neighbourhood and to those who organised and led the fight to preserve Glenway’s open spaces. They all deserve a medal. We now go on to Phase 2 which is pencilled in to start on 15 April. But no-one should believe it is a done deal and that Marianneville will get their 730 residential units.

It is not over until the fat lady sings.

Yesterday, after a mere ninety minute recess following the lawyers’ closing submissions, the OMB adjudicator, Susan Schiller, feels able to tell us, in outline, why she is backing the case put by Marianneville. Her detailed reasons will follow.

The OMB decision 

She says GPA Chair, Christina Bisanz, spoke movingly about the Club House being the beating heart of the community and that the Glenway lands were used extensively by people from Glenway and further afield. But, she says, it is not public open space.

She tells us what she did not hear in the course of the Hearing. She didn’t hear that the Town had taken any steps to acquire the land as public open space. Nor did she hear any arguments that the land should not be developed.

The key issue is whether the Growth Plan prohibited the development of the Glenway lands. She says the reasons advanced by the Town and GPA “defaulted to a series of processes”.

She is told the development is too big. Scale is an issue. But, she says, the Glenway proposal is not the only big development that has come forward. There is no policy that says proposals of a certain size must go through Town led processes.

Is the development needed? Schiller tells us need is not a criterion or test. The growth targets we heard about are all minimums, not caps.

We hear that the Growth Plan requires municipalities to designate intensification areas but the Town has a concomitant responsibility to look at, for example, major transit stations and how they fit into the big picture. That hadn’t happened.

Schiller reminds us that Marianneville had asked the Town to include a parcel of their land next to the GO Bus Station into the urban centre intensification area (basically the Yonge Davis corridors). The Town declined to do this saying a site specific application was before the OMB. The Board, Schiller says, “does not attach much weight to calls for a Town led process”.

Now the Adjudicator is moving up into fifth gear. This is turning in to a lecture. The Growth Plan says intensification should occur generally within the built boundary – not solely in designated intensification areas. She tells us this was not discussed by the expert witnesses called by the Town and the GPA.

Fatal Misunderstanding

We learn there was a fatal misunderstanding about the role of the Growth Plan “within the planning paradigm of the Province”. The Planning Act, which takes precedence over policy statements, specifically contemplates site specific applications. The real issue, therefore, is not the need for a Town led process but whether the lands can be developed in a way that conforms to all the relevant policy regimes and is appropriate and compatible with what is already there. And these, she tells us, are Phase 2 issues.

The Adjudicator, Susan Schiller, is probably as good as they come. She is sharp and quick to pick up on points. She can only consider matters put before her. If assertions made by one side are not rebutted by the other then she draws the appropriate conclusions. That’s the way the system works.

Key issues left unaddressed

It was obvious to everyone that key issues raised by Marianneville’s lawyer, Ira Kagan, were simply not being addressed.

As much as it pains me to say this, Kagan dominated the Hearing. He was like a tennis player, darting about the court, fighting for every point. After he finished every cross examination he would swivel round and ask individually the four people behind him if there was anything he had missed.

He can be dramatic (insofar as any lawyer is) talking with punctuation marks - but this forces us to listen and absorb his argument.

The Town’s counsel, Mary Bull, never stretched herself to return a difficult ball. She talks in a grey monotone giving me the impression she would rather be somewhere else. Glenway is just another job. Next week, I hear she is in North Bay. Another planning case. Another file to flip through.

James Feehley, counsel for the GPA, was, quite simply, out of his depth. Too often, he seemed a spectator rather than a participant. He is patronised by Kagan but laughs it off. It was his job to express lawyerly outrage on behalf of the Glenway people but it soon became clear to me this wasn’t going to happen.

Planning is not brain surgery. It is not that complicated.

The Hearing was dominated by the “experts” opining on the relevance of this or that policy, statement or plan. Christine Bisanz, was like a breath of fresh air, but where were the other Glenway people? Where was the Vox Pop?

People have quite a sophisticated view about what they like or dislike about their street, neighbourhood and Town – in that order. Their views on how the Town should grow and develop should be given weight. It is not something we cede to experts to decide on our behalf.

We learn the old golf course was used by Glenway people but also those from further afield. Does that mean open space is at a premium in Newmarket? (Yes) And, if so, will open space become even more valuable in the future as Newmarket’s population soars with tens of thousands of new residents in our midst? (Yes) Astonishingly, this was not an issue considered worthy of examination by the experts even though the Town has been looking at neighbourhoods that are short of open space.

OMB Hearing not people friendly

The Hearing is paper based. Everything is in huge lever arch files. Apart from one or two colourful plans of Glenway sitting on an easel next to the Adjudicator, there is nothing to help the public follow the proceedings. The witness statements and other relevant documents are not posted on the OMB website. We sit like lemons at the back of the room, trying to follow things as best we can. And even after it is all over we can’t read the transcript because, astonishingly, no record is taken. The millions of words uttered, unless captured by Schiller, disappear into the ether. Lost forever.

How did we get here?

Things went off the rails when the Town hired an outside consultant, Ruth Victor, to handle the Glenway file. She was soon biting the hand that feeds her. But I can’t blame her, entirely. She stepped into a policy vacuum and started making policy which, so far as I can tell, was accepted uncritically by the Planning Department and by the Mayor. Was any direction given to her? If not, why not? Seems to me there was a collective failure to give her a steer.

I am also left wondering how things would have played out if the Town had hired Nick McDonald to handle the Glenway file rather than Ruth Victor. I suspect we wouldn’t be where we are now.

The role of the Mayor and Councillors 

The Mayor lives on London Road. Would he have taken the same hands-off approach if he had lived on, say, Crossland Gate? I think not. At the very least his mind would have been focussed on the possibility of losing a treasured amenity, open space. He is by nature a man comfortable with process and procedure. He was content to leave it to the experts and then allow matters to take their course. It was a critical failure of leadership.

John Taylor, our Regional Councillor, nailed his colours to the mast on 25 November 2013 when he told Glenway people he would be furious if someone tried to build on forest land behind his house. He has said as much since. He is influential and his involvement at an early stage could have changed the course of events but that was not to happen. Ward 7 councillor, Chris Emanuel, has championed the Glenway cause from the beginning and he comes out of this saga well.

But, overall, it seems to me there has been a collective failure by elected officials to give guidance and direction to planning staff. The Town’s Planning Department is not a State within a State.

Was the outside consultant Ruth Victor allowed to write the Town’s policy on Glenway? What was the view of the Director of Planning, Rick Nethery?  Is it the case, as Kagan asserted, that the Town’s planning staff shared her opinions? If so, did he (Nethery) share this information with the Mayor or anyone else?

So powerful was Victor’s case that Kagan told the Adjudicator in his summing up:

 “If I was really brave I would not have called any other witnesses but I was scared not to.”

Throughout the Hearing Kagan had Marianneville’s hired planner on hand. Paul Lowes. The Town relied on Eric Chandler, a retired Chief Planner from New Tecumseth, who despite his genial manner and wide experience, could not answer for decisions made by the Town’s planning department. There was no-one from the Town Planning Department sitting in, addressing issues there and then, as they arose.

Pending Developments 

It was obvious to me in the very moment Kagan raised the issue, that developments elsewhere in Newmarket (as shown on the Planning Department’s “Pending Developments” map) were taking on a crucial significance. There were five developments cited by Kagan but he focussed on the Newmarket Cemetery Corporation land where 518 homes are being built. Kagan tells us the parcel of land is large; it is designated institutional (theoretically, no housing allowed); it is adjacent to a Stable Residential area and is privately owned

“and is as close to all fours to this case (Marianneville) as you can get.”

Kagan said it was unreasonable for the Town to hold up the Glenway development while waving through these other developments, all within Newmarket’s built boundary.

Yet the matter was never addressed by Bull.

What is to be done?

The Glenway Preservation Association may now be running out of cash and may not be able to retain counsel. In which case, responsibility devolves on the Town to make the best case it can to minimise the damage to Glenway.

In another bizarre twist to the story, Ruth Victor will be back again, paid by the Town to consider the technical issues thrown up by the proposed development.

The witness lists for Phase 2 are being drawn up as I write and should be with the Adjudicator by the end of next week.

I want to see people speaking up for Glenway, nor sabotaging its future.

This is no time to throw in the towel.

Newmarket councillors will meet on Monday afternoon (31 March) to consider their next move.