East Ottawa Star
Published: Friday, June 26, 2009 Downtown councillors get suburbs wrong The city has passed and confirmed its Official Plan (OP) amendment and flipped it off to Municipal Affairs Minister Jim Watson for approval. In a nutshell, the Official Plan is updated every five years and governs all land-use planning and trickle-down zoning decisions in our city. Regardless of where one stands on drawing the urban boundary to include or limit growth, most councillors are in agreement this round of OP debate did not address where and/or how the city will grow over the next 20 to 50 years. This visioning discussion has been punted to the “Choosing our Future” process in concert with the City of Gatineau and the NCC. However, as an east-ender, I take great umbrage to the myopic focus of some downtown and left-leaning councillors that all of us living in the ‘burbs (and let’s include Riverside South, Nepean and Kanata) are driving gas-guzzling SUVs, polluting beyond compare and ruining downtown intersections on a daily basis. Their Jane Jacobs’ all growth is bad; let’s all live in communes tirades are beyond the pale. Orléans, along with Kanata and Nepean, were purposely planned – mini-cities if you will – to be outside the Greenbelt. Our specific challenge in the east end is the lack of light industrial development when compared to our peers to the south and west. Slowly this will change with the opening of the Shenkman Arts Centre, a new hotel and La Cité’s trades school in 2010 – all enablers of future business development. But as a suburban community, our densities (people per hectare) are quite good. Just look at the new condo developments abutting St. Joseph Boulevard and the mix of housing choices in new residential areas from terrace homes to townhomes to single-family lots. And compared to some of the 70-by-140 ft. lots in parts of the Glebe (hello Coun. Clive Doucet) such as Clemow and Powell avenues, the 35- to 50-foot frontage lines in places like Avalon and Chapel Hill South are downright stingy. Moreover, our OC Transpo ridership numbers already exceed city targets. Just ask anyone boarding a 20- or 30-series express route in the morning. If you are not getting on at one of the first three stops on the route, you’re standing for the herky-jerky cattle run into the downtown core. What we have to start thinking about is how we consume energy and handle our waste. If we really want to show the Jane Jacobs crowd how narrow their thinking is, we need to look at how our community can be more sustainable. And not just in a one-off sort of way. Could some of our available green fields be used for solar power collector cells? Could we set our own east-end targets for recycling, waste-diversion and composting? And can we demand that retail and gathering places on Innes, Tenth Line and St. Joseph be more pedestrian-friendly? What else can we do? = = = = = Comments can be sent to Walter Robinson at orleansouttaakes@transcontinental.ca. |