So I guess I'll preface this by saying that I generally try to stray away from commenting on HRM planning processes. There are a lot of good people working very hard at HRM and on Council (yes), and there are also a lot of compounding historical reasons for why things are the way they are. I'm also wary of armchair quarterbacking things.
However, I think things are reaching critical level right now, and the involvement of the Province so far--while good intentioned--isn't necessarily productive. They've (rightly) seen a need for action, so I'm breaking my personal rules a little bit to chime in on what I, from the outside looking in, see as the challenges that need fixing.
On the planning side (versus permitting) the issues are not at all on the formal approvals timeline. Going through the committee process is a couple of months at most, and then another month or two after that for appeals periods etc. Importantly, that process is pretty predictable. Once you get there you can reasonably say, "great, we'll have an approval in hand by X date and therefore can start planning our detailed design and construction plans." Is it nice to shave a month or two off this? Sure. Is it fundamentally changing how fast approvals happen? No.
But the real delay is leading up to the formal approvals process. Going through staff review, getting a draft development agreement (if needed), getting a staff report, and then going through management sign-off takes literal years. Years and years and years. As I see it, there are a bunch of compounding reasons for this:
- Old plans. Many of the plans are grossly out of date, and the policies within them reflect a form of development that is no longer sufficient.
- Bad plans. A lot of HRMs planning documents are just downright bad. Some of this is a result of years of holding out-of-date plans together with duct tape, updating them in a piecemeal fashion to just enough to address the issue or planning application of the day, resulting in inconsistent and downright convoluted documents and polices. Some of this is a result of ill-thought-out approaches to planning from day one (Who came up with angle controls??? I'd like to have firm words with them.)
- Overly-complex development agreements. A development agreement should address the enabling policy. It should tackle the issues that make this situation different from as-of-right development. It should only be as complex as needed to tackle those issues. But HRM's long-standing practice has been to write development agreements to control all aspects of development, and to be VERY explicit. On top of that, HRM's default position is to list changes to the DA as substantive (i.e. requiring the whole process again for any amendments). This means developers are going through the process multiple times for a development and, importantly, it also means staff are tied up going through this process multiple times.
- Rigid and burdensome review process. The planner circulates the application to other departments multiple times throughout the process for comment. Then you'll get comments back, make changes to the proposal to address the comments, and then it needs to go back out for full review, even if the changes you make are exactly what they asked for.
- Lack of resources. Some of this is a result of the crush of development activity that's happened over the past two years. Some of it is a result of how much work HRM creates for themselves due to the above factors. Some of it is how much work Council creates for staff. It seems harmless to ask for a staff report on every little thing, but that's a couple days worth of work that's not going to more pressing things. Even worse is making planning decisions for political reasons knowing it will get appealed. Preparing for the UARB is pretty much a full-time job, so any time this happens you've put a planner's entire desk of projects on hold. Finally, there is a lot of shuffling of staff going on right now. Every time a planner takes a new job within HRM, their files sit for a couple of months waiting to be assigned to someone new, and then it takes the new person a couple of months getting up to speed.
If the Province truly wants to fix this issue--and I mean really fix it, not just put bandaids on--my recommendation would be to give HRM a pig pot of money to do the Suburban Plan, along with legislation for timelines on when it must be done, the public engagement process to be followed, and the benchmark levels of development it must accommodate. Require HRM to do a rough analysis of what current planning documents allow in terms of number of units, set a requirement for an uplift of X number of units, give minimum targets for each area so certain communities can't fight to exclude their community from sharing in the burden, and establish a minimum level of development that needs to proceed as-of-right. Centre Plan took a long time to get adopted, but it has shown how much a reasonable planning framework can do to unlock development potential. The activity in the Centre Plan area over the past two years has been staggering, even if people don't necessarily agree with the specifics of development heights etc.
For HRM's part, the review process and content of development agreements need to be toned down to only address what's necessary to meet the enabling policy within the Municipal Planning Strategy. It's super frustrating to have every little detail of a proposal nitpicked, when the zoning across the street allows something very similar with almost no oversight.
And again, I fully recognize that I'm on the outside here using the internet to spill my thoughts. But I sense a similar frustration from many staff within HRM who don't have the luxury of doing this.
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