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Whether the Salvation Army should be allowed to open a new homeless shelter on Montreal Road is strictly a land-use issue and can’t be handled by the group of councillors responsible for social services, the city hall legal department said Thursday afternoon.
The city’s top lawyer Rick O’Connor shot down multiple efforts by Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury to change the way the city will deal with the charity’s controversial application to move out of its obsolete Booth Centre in the ByWard Market.
Having city council’s planning committee (which deals with the rezoning the Salvation Army is seeking) and its community-services committee (which spends the city’s social-services budget) hold a joint meeting on the plan was just one of them. Instead, the planning committee is to discuss the proposal starting Nov. 14; a leaked draft of city’s staff planners’ report on it says the Salvation Army should get what it wants over Fleury’s objections.
Committees can only have joint meetings when their duties intersect, O’Connor wrote. That’s rare and it doesn’t apply here. Whether the city is willing to help pay for the expanded complex the Salvation Army intends to build is totally separate from whether the Salvation Army has a good case for using land occupied by a decrepit motel for it.
“If council were found to have based its decision on housing policy considerations, such as those regarding funding and operations, instead of or as well as planning considerations, that decision may be found to be outside of its Planning Act jurisdiction,” O’Connor wrote. No matter what the decision was, it’d risk being overturned by the Ontario Municipal Board, he warned.
“While the distinction between planning considerations and policy considerations may seem subtle, it is an important one as all planning decisions must be founded on a solid planning rationale and not incorporate extraneous considerations,” he wrote.
Fleury hoped to use work the city did in 2006 and 2008, when councillors were worried about a proliferation of shelters and related services in the ByWard Market and Lowertown, to fight the Vanier proposal. None of that applies, O’Connor wrote. The strongest rejections of new shelters then were in preambles to motions and executive summaries of reports, none of which ever had any legal force, the lawyer wrote, and anyway city councils are only bound by decisions they’ve made since the most recent election.
Fleury can still try to convince his fellow councillors to reject the proposal. The key change the Salvation Army needs is permission to provide a 140-bed emergency shelter as part of a much bigger social-services complex; everything else it wants to do is allowed by Montreal Road’s current zoning.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The city’s top lawyer Rick O’Connor shot down multiple efforts by Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury to change the way the city will deal with the charity’s controversial application to move out of its obsolete Booth Centre in the ByWard Market.
Having city council’s planning committee (which deals with the rezoning the Salvation Army is seeking) and its community-services committee (which spends the city’s social-services budget) hold a joint meeting on the plan was just one of them. Instead, the planning committee is to discuss the proposal starting Nov. 14; a leaked draft of city’s staff planners’ report on it says the Salvation Army should get what it wants over Fleury’s objections.
Committees can only have joint meetings when their duties intersect, O’Connor wrote. That’s rare and it doesn’t apply here. Whether the city is willing to help pay for the expanded complex the Salvation Army intends to build is totally separate from whether the Salvation Army has a good case for using land occupied by a decrepit motel for it.
“If council were found to have based its decision on housing policy considerations, such as those regarding funding and operations, instead of or as well as planning considerations, that decision may be found to be outside of its Planning Act jurisdiction,” O’Connor wrote. No matter what the decision was, it’d risk being overturned by the Ontario Municipal Board, he warned.
“While the distinction between planning considerations and policy considerations may seem subtle, it is an important one as all planning decisions must be founded on a solid planning rationale and not incorporate extraneous considerations,” he wrote.
Fleury hoped to use work the city did in 2006 and 2008, when councillors were worried about a proliferation of shelters and related services in the ByWard Market and Lowertown, to fight the Vanier proposal. None of that applies, O’Connor wrote. The strongest rejections of new shelters then were in preambles to motions and executive summaries of reports, none of which ever had any legal force, the lawyer wrote, and anyway city councils are only bound by decisions they’ve made since the most recent election.
Fleury can still try to convince his fellow councillors to reject the proposal. The key change the Salvation Army needs is permission to provide a 140-bed emergency shelter as part of a much bigger social-services complex; everything else it wants to do is allowed by Montreal Road’s current zoning.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
