Calgary city councillors defeated proposed amendments to already completed Local Area Plans that would have aligned them with land use changes made through citywide rezoning.
The item, dubbed Local Area Plan (LAP) Reconnect, was reviewed Wednesday in the continuation of the Feb. 4 Public Hearing Meeting of Council. It came forward as a result of direction in the Home is Here housing strategy and the Rezoning for Housing plan to determine if changes were needed to the Westbrook, Heritage and North Hill Local Area Plans to bring them in line with current overarching municipal bylaws.
The North Hill LAP was approved in 2021, while Westbrook and Heritage were approved in 2023 – nearly a year before citywide rezoning was passed. Citywide rezoning would have made the default land use RCG, which allows for multiple units on a parcel, something that may have conflicted with prior-approved LAPs.
In the public submissions, most, if not all in opposition, went along the general theme that the approved LAPs were years in the making, built on hundreds of hours of consultation. They’d created a plan, only for it to be disregarded a short time later.
Doug McNeill, who worked on the planning committee for the Heritage LAP, said they spent three years reviewing, commenting, listening and work to create a densification strategy for the communities.
“It was incredible frustrating and disappointing to have attended the LAP update at the Rose Kohn arena to ask the question, what was the result of all that work to make a plan, only to have it over-ridden by a blanket densification initiative,” McNeill wrote in his public submission.
“I actually felt sorry for the City representatives in attendance. They (had) absolutely no answer to this question.”
In the city administration cover page, they indicated the risk in not approving the proposed amendments. First off, they said the plans wouldn’t be aligned with existing land use in those communities, nor the Housing Strategy.
“Additionally, there is a potential risk that site-specific amendments to the Plans may be required when development permit applications are submitted to The City as the approved land use would not be in alignment with specific policies of the local area plan,” the report read.
Commitment made to citizens: Coun. Penner
Ward 11 Coun. Kourtney Penner said that when the LAPs were approved, one of the commitments they made to communities was that they wouldn’t amend the local area plans on a parcel-by-parcel basis.
Penner said among the LAPs, there are roughly 90 development applications in the queue, totaling around 600 homes, pending approval of the area amendments. She said now they would have to go back and approve those one-by-one if they even moved ahead at all.
“That wasn’t the commitment we made to the community,” she said.
“It was kind of like an all-or-nothing, and so we’re like in many ways, we’ve broken trust with the community yet again, and it’s coming at a huge expense.”
According to Penner, the defeat Wednesday also sends a signal to inner city developers that it’s better to do business in more permissive environments like Edmonton. Further, she said that the tax uplift expected from added density was a revenue stream for the city and could have helped fund planned improvement in these communities.
She also took aim at her colleagues who voted against – many of whom voted against citywide rezoning. She felt these amendments should have been housekeeping items.
“Instead, we had people who are on an ideological warpath against townhomes, row housing, and rather than, in good governance, upholding a previous democratic decision, they doubled down today,” she said.
While this decision wouldn’t have made parcel-by-parcel changes, it would have abruptly changed the entire LAP determined by citizens, according to Ward 1 Coun. Sonya Sharp. Sharp voted against the amendments to the LAPs.
She said the proposed amendments were directly a result of the city’s approval of citywide rezoning – something Sharp maintains 70 per cent of citizens are opposed to.
“It would be very, say, kind of hypocritical of me to support what was coming forward today when I was adamantly against blanket rezoning,” she said.
Sharp said residents felt like the Local Area Plan Reconnect meant that the design of LAPs was a waste of their time and effort if they were just going to be changed like this.
She also didn’t see it as standing in the way of development. As demonstrated by the 27 land use items on this month’s agenda, Sharp said there’s still building going on. Further, she said thousands of homes could be built with investment in further infrastructure, like in Crestmont in her ward.
“The policy stuff isn’t hindering people from building, it’s the infrastructure that’s required to support some of these developments,” Sharp said.
