At General Committee this week Council had before it 3 applications looking for zoning amendments. Council could decide to receive the applications, as per the staff recommendation and proceed to a public planning meeting where the application would be heard or council could deny receiving the application outright as per the provisions of Bill 73.
As noted in the staff report, “the provisions of Bill 73, works so that once a Comprehensive Zoning By-law is approved by Council – no new site-specific zoning by-law amendments can be submitted to the Town for a period of two (2) years, unless Council passes a resolution permitting a specific application.”
While the Mayor feels that once an application is “in the cue”, then Council should allow it to proceed to public planning, I believe we need to look at the merits of the application and then decide if we should allow the application to be heard at public planning or tell them to go away and come back with something that is in keeping with the vision of Our Town as defined in our Official Plan…Bill 73 provides Council with this land-use planning tool, why wouldn’t we use it? Making a decision to hear an application solely on when talks began and not looking at the merits of the application itself is in my mind making an uninformed decision. Here is what I said…
