Revised Official Plan & Possible Fate of Lemoine Point Farm
Urgent requests for you to contact the City
Hello! We are sending out yet another urgent No Clearcuts Kingston newsletter because of two concerning issues the City is dealing with this week.
Lemoine Point Farm
Supporters of Lemoine Point Farm believes that the waterfront property to which TODAY’s closed Council meeting agenda item refers is the Farm property.
Tuesday (June 18th) at 5 PM agenda item:
"Advice that is subject to solicitor-client privilege, including communications necessary for that purpose, and a proposed or pending acquisition or disposition of land by the municipality or local board - Waterfront Property."
We hope that you can contact the Mayor and city councillors today, before 2 PM if possible. Here are email contacts you can use, which will be delivered to the Mayor and all members of council:
mayor&council@cityofkingston.ca
Please copy the city clerk: cityclerk@cityofkingston.ca and Lanie Hurdle: lhurdle@cityofkingston.ca
Official Plan Updates
The Planning Committee is discussing updates to the Official Plan on Thursday. We think that the City is overreacting to pressures for increased housing. Yes, we need more housing, but City staff are adopting a destructive way of dealing with the issue!
Please read the Coalition of Kingston Communities’ media release below. If you agree that the number of Official Plan changes are being pushed through too quickly, without enough public input, please email the members of the Planning Committee and tell them we citizens need more time to examine the changes.
The Planning Committee is meeting on Thursday June 20th, so please email or call asap:
Councillor Cinanni - Chair … vcinanni@cityofkingston.ca
Councillor Glenn - Vice-Chair cglenn@cityofkingston.ca
Councillor Chaves pchaves@cityofkingston.ca
Councillor McLaren jmclaren@cityofkingston.ca
Councillor Oosterhof goosterhof@cityofkingston.ca
Councillor Osanic lsanic@cityofkingston.ca
Coalition of Kingston Communities’ Media Release:
Coalition asks City to put brakes on passing amendments to the City’s OfficialPlan and Zoning Bylaws
The City has responded to federal incentives for building more housing with a massive omnibus of 268 amendments slated for Planning Committee approval on June 20th, 2024.
The amendments range from cleaning up terms to reflect new terminology (replacing
“Provincial Policy Statement” with “Provincial Policy”, to significant relaxations in development procedures which would allow more development decisions to be made by the unelected Committee of Adjustment or by staff, bypassing elected councillors who sit on Planning Committee.
There are also amendments that have important implications, such as replacing “medium density residential” with “mid-rise residential.” Mid-rise residential buildings are defined as “generally between 4 and 6 storeys in height, but may be outside of this range depending on the context and ability to meet the compatibility and locational criteria for mid-rise buildings.” (Amendment 91 s2.6.2)
Key definitions remain opaque such as the one relating to affordable housing (Amendment 53), and gone are the specific requirements that would ensure the development of housing that is affordable to low and medium income people. Instead, on affordable housing, the amendments offer generalities: “This Plan supports an increase in the overall supply of all forms of housing in appropriate locations to address housing affordability and the housing crisis.” (Amendment 89)
“The Coalition of Kingston Communities sees these amendments as a disintegration of the City’s current planning policies. They are being replaced with across-the-city permissions to build almost anything, anywhere, in established residential neighbourhoods, in rural areas, in heritage districts,” said Christine Sypnowich, Coalition Chair.
The Coalition has submitted this list of primary concerns to Planning Committee for consideration at its meeting on June 20th.
1. The varied and extensive changes to the City’s Official Plan and Zoning Bylaws cover a broad range of significant planning policies, from, for example, the replacement of the term, medium density, which has a specific formula, to a concept of “mid-rise residential buildings”, that is variable. This change adds vagueness to planning policy in Kingston.
2. The proposed amendments take many planning decisions out of the hands of the Planning Committee and City Council (elected councillors) and hand decision-making over the city’s development to the Committee of Adjustment (nominated members of the public) and to staff.
3. There is not sufficient time for elected officials and the public to consider the impact of 268 changes to the Official Plan and Zoning Bylaws on their neighbourhoods.
4. Some of the changes are incomplete and require more work, for instance, the provisions for requiring community benefits have been removed and there is only a promise that a new bylaw will eventually be prepared.
5. The change to the definition of “affordable housing” does not create more housing that meets the needs of people at lower income levels including a growing number of the middle class. There are no provisions for ensuring that developers will build for those in need of reasonable rental properties, no provisions for rent control, no protection of rent rates when a lease turns over, no provisions against “renovictions”. This reneges on the City’s commitment to ensuring new development increases the availability of affordable housing.
6. These proposed changes threaten to alter the fabric of the entire city: rural areas, the suburbs, downtown, heritage districts and so on. When changes are made at this scale you no longer have a city working according to a coherent, democratically determined plan. You have a development free-for-all.
We therefore ask elected City Councillors to put the brakes on these massive changes so that Council and the public can assess their impact on the future of Kingston before it is too late.
“The democratic process requires that the public have time to respond to these extensive and significant proposed changes. A proposal to give up so many planning controls in the hope of securing federal building funds is a risk not worth taking,” said Sypnowich.
No Clearcuts Kingston