If you missed the last Council meeting preview, you can find it here. As for the tardiness of this update, this can be attributed to the fact that I spent most of this past week in Montreal on business.
Recap
- As predicted, the closed meeting was rather short. Less than a few minutes.
- Brian Lima, our outgoing Director of Public Works & Engineering, spoke at length about the Winter Operations Plan and what it meant. He did his best to dispel rumours about minimum service levels, the municipality’s adherence to them, and whether other roads can be prioritized.
- I understand, and certainly appreciate, why many members of our community would like to see some roads plowed before others. Unfortunately provincial statues prevent us from doing that. So, for example, it would be great to see residential roads cleared before arterial roads, but the province’s road standards for how to prioritize roads over others don’t allow us this type of flexibility.
- No doubt that is frustrating, especially when you’re trying to get your kids on the bus or drive to work! But this is not something we can simply change for ourselves locally.
- Council voted to receive the information related to the small walkway around the building at the NW corner of Glendon & Komoka Rd.
Committee of Adjustment
- The request for the modified setback to accommodate the walkway was approved.
- The request for a variance from the maximum accessory building size was approved.
- The request for a larger-than-normal building was also approved.
Public Meetings
- The severance for the surplus farm residence was approved.
- The permit to temporarily allow two residential was approved.
- The land severance was approved, but not until after a lot of questions from the public and Council regarding the nature of the request. I admit the severance is a bit odd because of the amount of water on both properties, and the fact that one body of water was being severed. However, this type of request is not abnormal, just rare, and is allowed. If there is a matter of water pollutants to be handled later, it will be dealt with between the property owners (assuming one parcel is sold).
- It turns out the request to create three residential lots along Oxbow Drive is part of a much larger subdivision plan of roughly 80 lots!
- This was news to me and residents in the area as well. Staff stated quite clearly that while they were satisfied allowing three lots to begin first, the fact remains those three lots are part of a much larger subdivision. A subdivision of just three lots does not require a subdivision plan, but the rest of the development does.
- I told the planner that was representing the developer that I didn’t like this, and that it felt sneaky to go this route. The planner disagreed and said selling the three smaller lots was really an attempt to raise funds to plan out the rest of the development, which still left me feeling like this wasn’t ready and, therefore, does require more negotiation with staff.
- Council approved deferring the matter back to staff for additional negotiation and information seeking.
To wrap things up, Councillor McMillan’s motion to have staff look at bylaws and trends in other municipalities for large accessory buildings was approved. We also had brief discussions about the AMO’s correspondence regarding cannabis legalization and retail sales. The last County Council meeting was cancelled, so Deputy Mayor DeViet did not have an update for us.
And that was October 24th’s Council meeting! If you have any questions, please contact me.