County and province edge closer to Official Plan agreement

Jeff Green | Aug 26, 2015

It has been a long, slow, dance of sorts, but it seems that the County of Frontenac and the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH) are about to come to terms over the County's first Official Plan.

Joe Gallivan, the Manager of Planning Services for Frontenac County, said on Tuesday that after a lot of meetings, emails and phone conversations, staff at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs “basically get where we are coming from as far as the kind of Official Plan that fits for Frontenac County”.

On several key issues, such as development on private lanes and setbacks for waterfront development, Gallivan said the ministry has allowed for the kind of softer language that will allow Frontenac County to both encourage the kind of development that county residents are looking for and remain within the parameters of the latest Provincial Policy Statement, which is the basis of all planning activities in Ontario.

“There are some issues of wording where I think they are off base or unclear, but most of them are not important enough for our purposes to fight over,” said Gallivan.

For that reason he recommended that Council accept most of the revisions requested by the ministry in their draft response to the Official Plan that was submitted by the County several months ago.

On 18 specific wording changes in the plan, however, Gallivan recommended that Council not make the changes suggested by the MMAH.

These include a number of measures that, in Gallivan's view, do not belong in a regional plan because they refer to specific locations, such as the Village of Sydenham in regards to water systems. These he said would be best left to the discretion of the Township of South Frontenac's own Official Plan.

Other changes are either unclear, or based on false assumptions.

In one case, for example, the MMAH would like the County to make use of the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) database as regards endangered species.

“But we do not have a data sharing agreement with the MNR over that information, so we can't make use of it,” said Gallivan.

While there remain areas of disagreement, Gallivan expressed optimism for the first time in months, that the province will accept a version of the County Official Plan that is acceptable to Frontenac County Council, avoiding a costly and time-consuming appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board.

Once the Official Plan is accepted, it will be County Council, and not the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, that will be the approval body for local township Official Plans.