The agreement between the city and the two community associations closest to Lansdowne Park (the Glebe CA and the Old Ottawa South CA) is arguably better for the city as a whole than a protracted battle in front of the Ontario Municipal Board. But wow, what disingenuous spin from both sides.
The community groups' first. Their joint press release makes it sound like they had guns to their heads:
The Glebe Community Association (GCA) and the Old Ottawa South Community Association (OSCA) announced today that they have negotiated changes to the Lansdowne Park development with the City of Ottawa that will help reduce some of the negative impacts of the development on their respective communities. However, the changes agreed to by the City are conditional on the associations dropping their appeal of the zoning to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB).
...
“These changes do address some issues that were of concern to the community,” said OSCA board member Brendan McCoy, who was closely involved in the negotiations. But McCoy emphasized that the prohibitive cost of proceeding with an appeal before the OMB, and the risk of a far worse outcome if the appeal failed, were the major factors in the association’s difficult decision to settle.
The OSCA board viewed the situation as akin to a hostage-taking, said McCoy, with residents in the Bank Street and Holmwood Avenue area as the hostages. “We were really in this to protect neighbours living in the immediate area, and according to the legal advice we received, the deal wasn’t going to get any better than this. We’re still tremendously unsatisfied, but we’re convinced the outcome for these residents could have been far worse had we continued—and lost—the fight.”
McCoy said the OMB appeal process can be expensive, difficult and unpredictable. “The costs stack the deck against community associations,” he said.
These are a couple of the best-funded, best-organized citizens' groups in the entire city. They can afford an OMB fight. The Friends of Lansdowne, an ad hoc group, is pressing on with their court case against the development, which is a much more expensive proposition. And in any event, the costs and terms of the battle would have been well known to the Glebe and Old Ottawa South community associations before they set out.
The key to it is: "according to the legal advice we received, the deal wasn’t going to get any better than this." It's not that they couldn't afford the fight, it's that the fight wasn't going to get them anywhere.
My criticisms of the OMB are well known — I don't see that we need a tribunal whose whole purpose is to second-guess mature city councils' planning decisions when the courts can do a decent job of forcing them into line when they outright break the rules. And its defining principles are generally pro-sprawl, putting it at odds with cities that have made deliberate decisions to rein themselves in. But it's not a purely evil body. Sometimes you lose at the OMB because your case isn't very strong. When your elected city council has duly approved a major intensification project, you're going to have a difficult time demonstrating that it's a planning decision that should be overturned, and that's as it should be. Elected councils' views are supposed to matter.
On the other side, the city and OSEG are willingly scaling back the Lansdowne project in ways they strongly implied were simply impossible earlier in the debate.
- The mid-rise residential buildings facing on Holmwood Avenue will be eliminated.
- The height of the residential tower at Bank and Holmwood will be reduced to 12 storeys.
- A small public open space located at the corner of Bank and Holmwood will be added.
- The amount of residential development will be capped at 280 units.
- Reduction in the heights of two commercial buildings.
Over and over, we heard that the residential and commercial development on the site was as minimal as could be without compromising the cost-neutrality of the project. Take any of this stuff out and the city and OSEG start to lose money. Well, now we're taking a bunch of stuff out and apparently it's fine. One wonders how much more could be removed from the plans before they really went kablooey.
Unfortunately, from a planning perspective, we don't seem to be opening up any land again, except for the "small public open space" at the very northwest corner, where the little benches-and-planters parkette is now. All the building "footprints" are the same, it sounds like, but they'll be shorter and therefore less dense. The people living on Holmwood will be getting a lot of their light back, which is in itself a good thing — they were the neighbours getting the worse of the whole project for sure — but the overall effect is to surrender the same amount of public land for less benefit at greater cost.
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