Councillor King provided comments concerning his opposition to the Manor Park Secondary Plan during the April 13 Council meeting.
"In terms of this application, I will be supporting the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that, through continuous dialogue between the developer and the community, will create a community benefits agreement. A Community Benefits Agreement is a legally enforced arrangement concerning development projects which seeks specific social value outcomes to ensure that projects enhance social, cultural, environmental, and economic opportunities for a community. I am very pleased that the MOU will enable the community to work with the Applicant to address a broad range of community needs through the creation of an agreement “by the community for the community” which will be the first of its kind in Ottawa. I am also supportive of this MOU since it will provide guarantees against tenant displacement and will also provide guarantees for housing affordability. I therefore will support those recommendations.
I, however, have many continuing concerns about the land use planning aspects of the proposed Secondary Plan for Manor Park North and Manor Park South. I have heard from the community, and I agree with them that this re-development goes beyond this community’s fair share of the City’s intensification, not just in terms of the massive overall increase in development density, but in the typology of towers, instead of ground-oriented family-sized units and the locating of these high-rise and mid-rise towers other than near to transit priority corridors such as Montreal Road.
In addition, this planning application is deficient since there needed to be a better-coordinated commitment between the Applicant and the City for:
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realistic and funded plans for better transit service, active transportation, and other physical and social infrastructure improvements
- transportation planning that truly takes into account and plans to accommodate the cumulative impacts of the build-out of Wateridge Village, and other developments along Montreal Road and Beechwood;
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protection of community green space and the tree canopy; and
- a study predicting, and planning for the mitigation of, environmental and health impacts during the multi-decade demolition and construction phases and once the development is fully built out (which would include everything from management plans for excess soils, construction and demolition waste including asbestos and other hazardous substances, to controlling noise and dust and construction equipment emissions, to urban design for health and wellbeing along with effectively creating 15-minute neighbourhoods).
Due to these deficiencies, I opposed the planning elements of the Manor Park Secondary Plan at Council on April 22, 2022."
