March 8, 2022, at 4:00 PM

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The meeting is called to order at 4:01 PM; it being noted that Acting Mayor J. Morgan was in the Chair and the following members were in remote attendance: M. van Holst, M. Salih, J. Helmer, M. Cassidy, M. Hamou, A. Hopkins, P. Van Meerbergen, S. Turner, E. Peloza and S. Hillier.

1.   Disclosures of Pecuniary Interest

That it BE NOTED that no pecuniary interests were disclosed.

2.   Consent

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by M. van Holst

That Consent Items 2.1 to 2.4 BE APPROVED, excluding item 2.3.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

2.1   2022 Assessment Growth Funding Allocation

2022-03-08 Staff Report - 2022 Assessment Growth Funding Allocation

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by M. van Holst

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Finance Supports, the 2022 Assessment Growth Funding Allocation Report BE RECEIVED for information; it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated March 3, 2022 from C. Butler with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed

2.2   Access to City of London Funding for Social and Economic Recovery – London Community Recovery Network

2022-03-08 Staff Report - Access to City of London Funding

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by M. van Holst

That, on the recommendation of the City Manager, the following actions be taken with respect to access to City of London funding for social and economic recovery – London Community Recovery Network:

a)    the proposed formal process for accessing community recovery funding, BE ENDORSED;

b)    the amount of $100,000 over two years (2022-2023) from funding set aside by City Council to support social and economic recovery BE APPROVED for allocation to the Deputy City Manager, Planning and Economic Development to create the LCRN Readiness Fund in support of small-scale recovery efforts in the community; and,

c)    the report entitled Access to City of London Funding for Social and Economic Recovery – London Community Recovery Network BE RECEIVED.

Motion Passed

2.4   Resignation of C. Neville from the Hyde Park BIA Board of Management

2022-03-08 Submission - HPBIA Resignation

Moved by E. Peloza

Seconded by M. van Holst

That the resignation of Curtis Neville, Giant Tiger, from the Hyde Park BIA Board of Management BE ACCEPTED.

Motion Passed

2.3   Core Area Action Plan 2021 Review

2022-03-08 Staff Report - Core Area Action Plan

Moved by M. van Holst

Seconded by A. Hopkins

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Environment & Infrastructure, the Deputy City Manager, Planning & Economic Development, and the Deputy City Manager, Social & Health Development, the following actions be taken:

a)    the staff report dated March 8, 2022 entitled “Core Area Action Plan 2021 Review”, including its appendices, BE RECEIVED;

b)    the changes to the status or end dates of the items included the Core Area Action Plan described in the report and summarized in Appendix “A”: Core Area Action Plan Implementation Status Update, March 2022 BE APPROVED and used as the new basis for future progress reporting; 

c)    the extension of the “Project Clean Slate” contract with Youth Opportunities Unlimited for a period from April 1, 2022 through December 31, 2022 BE APPROVED at a cost of $146,760; it being noted that funding is available through the Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Economy (EEE) Reserve;

d)    the Core Area Action Plan Performance Measurement Plan contained in Appendix “G” to the report BE RECEIVED noting that it will become part of the annual monitoring of the impacts of the Core Area Action Plan and associated report to Council; 

e)    the Core Area Action Plan Gap Analysis contained in Appendix “H” to the report BE RECEIVED; and,

f)    staff BE DIRECTED to prepare an updated Core Area Action Plan expanding the current plan to the years 2024 to 2027 inclusive for the consideration of Council in 2023 in coordination with the next Multi-Year Budget and Strategic Plan development processes and based on the general methodology described in the report.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

3.   Scheduled Items

None.

4.   Items for Direction

4.1   Development Charge Area Rating Policy Review – Recommended Approach

2022-03-08 Staff Report - DC Area Rating

Moved by S. Turner

Seconded by M. Hamou

That the matter of the Development Charge Area Rating Policy Review – Recommended Approach, BE REFERRED back to the Civic Administration for further consideration, and research of options that would better recognize true cost discrepancies between new infrastructure costs inside and outside of the build area, including but not limited to stormwater management.

Motion Passed (10 to 4)

4.2   Confirmation of Appointments to the Old East Village BIA

2022-03-08 Submission - OEVBIA Appointments

Moved by J. Helmer

Seconded by J. Fyfe-Millar

That the following actions be taken with respect to the Old East Village BIA:

a)  the resignations of Jamie Sinden, Love Alchemy Hair Salon, Ellie Cook, The Root Cellar and Heather Blackwell, Western Fair District BE ACCEPTED; and,

b) Kelli Gough, The Palace Theatre Arts Commons and Michelle Scott, Western Fair District BE APPOINTED for the term ending November 14, 2022.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

4.3   Including a Carbon Offset Strategy - Councillor M. van Holst

2022-03-08 Submission - Carbon Offset Strategy

Moved by A. Hopkins

Seconded by J. Fyfe-Millar

That the communication from Councillor M. van Holst with respect to a carbon offset strategy BE RECEIVED.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

Additional votes:

Moved by M. van Holst

Seconded by S. Hillier

That the Civic Administration BE DIRECTED to include additional detailed calculations/information related to carbon offsets as an option for households in the draft Climate Emergency Action Plan, in order for inclusion in the public consultation of the Plan.

Motion Failed (3 to 11)

4.4   3rd Report of the Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Oppression Advisory Committee

2022-03-08 3rd Report of DIAAC

Moved by A. Hopkins

Seconded by M. Cassidy

That the following actions be taken with respect to the 3rd Report of the Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Oppression Advisory Committee from its meeting held on February 17, 2022:

a)  the Governance Working Group BE REQUESTED to consider continued membership or in the appointment process, the re-appointment of existing members to ensure the continuity of Advisory Committee membership; and,

b)  clauses 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.4, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 7.1 BE RECEIVED for information.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

Additional votes:

Moved by J. Fyfe-Millar

Seconded by S. Lewis

That the Committee BE RECESSED at this time.

Motion Passed (12 to 1)

The Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee recessed from 6:34 PM to 6:54 PM.

5.   Deferred Matters/Additional Business

5.1   (ADDED) Palace Theatre Arts Commons Loan Forgiveness Business Case

2022-03-08 Submission - Palace Theatre Arts Commons

Moved by J. Fyfe-Millar

Seconded by J. Helmer

That the following actions be taken with respect to the Palace Theatre Arts Commons loan forgiveness:

a) the Civic Administration BE AUTHORIZED to further extend the deferral period, on Community Improvement Plan loan repayments, on an interest-free basis for a further period of 274 days, being April 2022 to December 2022, where the applicant has requested a further deferral in writing; it being noted that the Jan 2023 loan repayments will be cashed as planned; and,

b) the Business Case from the Palace Theatre Arts Commons BE APPROVED and the Civic Administration BE AUTHORIZED to forgive the remaining balance of the interest-free loan to the London Community Players, in the amount of $78,749.83, with the previously allocated London Community Recovery Network (LCRN) funding as the source of financing; 

it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated March 4, 2022 from K. Gough, Chair, Palace Theatre Arts Commons and a communication dated March 7, 2022 from Councillors J. Helmer and J. Fyfe-Millar with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed

Voting Record:

Moved by J. Fyfe-Millar

Seconded by J. Helmer

Motion to approve part a)

That the following actions be taken with respect to the Palace Theatre Arts Commons loan forgiveness:

a) the Civic Administration BE AUTHORIZED to further extend the deferral period, on Community Improvement Plan loan repayments, on an interest-free basis for a further period of 274 days, being April 2022 to December 2022, where the applicant has requested a further deferral in writing; it being noted that the Jan 2023 loan repayments will be cashed as planned; and,

Motion Passed (12 to 0)

Moved by J. Fyfe-Millar

Seconded by J. Helmer

Motion to approve part b)

b) the Business Case from the Palace Theatre Arts Commons BE APPROVED and the Civic Administration BE AUTHORIZED to forgive the remaining balance of the interest-free loan to the London Community Players, in the amount of $78,749.83, with the previously allocated London Community Recovery Network (LCRN) funding as the source of financing; 

it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated March 4, 2022 from K. Gough, Chair, Palace Theatre Arts Commons and a communication dated March 7, 2022 from Councillors J. Helmer and J. Fyfe-Millar with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (11 to 1)

6.   Confidential (Enclosed for Members only.)

Moved by S. Lehman

Seconded by M. Cassidy

That the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee convene, In Closed Session, with respect to the following matters:

6.1. Labour Relations/Employee Negotiations

A matter pertaining to labour relations and employee negotiations.

6.2. Personal Matters/Identifiable Individual

A matter pertaining to personal matters, including information regarding an identifiable individual, with respect to  employment-related matters; advice or recommendations of officers and employees of the Corporation, including communications necessary for that purpose and for the purpose of providing instructions and directions to officers and

employees of the Corporation.

Motion Passed

The Corporate Services Committee convenes, In Closed Session, from 7:13 PM to 8:34 PM.

7.   Adjournment

Moved by S. Lehman

Seconded by J. Fyfe-Millar

That the meeting BE ADJOURNED.

Motion Passed

The meeting adjourned at 8:35 PM.

Full Transcript

Transcript provided by Lillian Skinner’s London Council Archive. Note: This is an automated speech-to-text transcript and may contain errors. Speaker names are not identified.

View full transcript (3 hours, 24 minutes)

Can I get colleagues participating digitally to turn on your cameras so that the clerk could do a quorum check for me? Or signal if you don’t want to turn on your camera? Okay, it looks like we have quorum. So I’m going to call the meeting of SPPC to order.

This is the fifth meeting of the strategic priorities and policy committee meeting. This is a virtual meeting held during the COVID-19 emergency. Please check the city’s website for current details on COVID-19 services and their impacts. Meetings today can be viewed via live stream and on the YouTube channel and on the city’s website.

And the city of London is committed to making every effort to provide alternate formats and communication supports for council standing and advisory committee meetings and information upon request. To make a request for any city service, please contact accessibility@london.ca or 519-661-2489, extension 2425. To make a request specific to this meeting, you can contact sppc@london.ca. I’ll start off with disclosures of pecuniary interest and look for colleagues who would like to identify those at this time.

Okay, seeing none, we have four consent items. There is one added letter on one of those items on the added agenda. I’ll look to colleagues to identify which of those you’d like to deal with separately. Councilor Hymou.

And you owe 2.3, please. Yes. Are there items to deal with separately colleagues? That means I could look for a motion for the approval of 2.1, 2.2 and 2.4.

That’s items on assessment growth allocation, an LRCN structure and update and a resignation from the Hyde Park BIA. Someone willing to move those three items. Councilor Palosa, seconded by Councilor Van Holst, discussion on those. Councilor Hopkins.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. And I do have a question on 2.2, which is the London funding for social and economic recovery from the London Community Recovery Network. Happy to support the recommendation.

The amount of 100,000 over the next two years. As we undertake a recovery, it’s going to be needed. I do have a question around the process. And I know we have to fit the processes in place, but how is the, how is it communicated to small businesses, small organizations, in particular, ones that do not have BIAs, just wondering what the plan of the communication of this support this to the community.

Through you to staff. Yes, I don’t know if that’s going to be Ms. Livingston or Mr. Thompson.

Hi, Mr. Chair, I’m happy to start. So our initial communication will be out through the LCRN membership. And then we can extend it more broadly.

What’s important to note is that whatever we support through the LCRN readiness fund will have to be in alignment with the LCRN framework. So people will need to understand that well and be able to demonstrate it. But we can commit to communicating fairly broadly, but the initial method will be through the LCRN membership. Thank you for that.

I think it’s important that it be distributed broadly. There could be a number of groups out there, organizations that may not be members, but just to have them be aware of it and to look into possibilities of applying for funding would be important. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Vanholst.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I just wanted to acknowledge the great amount of work that went into item 2.1 by our staff. So certainly determining how much new assessment growth funding was available and then prioritizing that across many departments.

So I think they’ve done a good job here. Obviously, it’s a lot of work preparing all these business cases. So 22 in total. So gratitude there.

And of course, out of the nine, almost $10 million of funds in additional assessment growth, there’s about $900 or $1000 left that’s being applied to our policy for surplus amounts there. So 50% into debt reduction on a one-time basis and 50% into the capital infrastructure gap reserve fund. So that’s another thing that always comes up and it’s always on our mind is the filling that infrastructure gap. So again, thanks for that work that went into this and in a fairly timely work too, really in the year.

So thank you. Thank you. Any further comments on the items before us? Councillor Lewis.

Thank you, Chair. And through you, I just wanted to take an opportunity as well to comment on the assessment growth, the work that’s gone into it and the allocation recommendations of our course appreciated. And it often involves not only our staff, but of course, work has to be done by folks at the transit commission at London Police Services. So there’s outside staff involved in that too, whose work is appreciated.

I really think that the assessment growth cases that we’re seeing this year are very supportable and very much speak to the importance of addressing the nuts and bolts needs of continuing our city operations. And I wanted to speak specifically to the funding of the police services ‘cause I’ve had some questions about this and I think it’s really important to highlight. London City Council does not decide on how the police allocate their budgets. They submit a budget to us and we approve it or we don’t.

And if we don’t, well, there’s appeal mechanisms and we know what that road looks like. But we don’t direct the police in that way. I do, however, think it’s important to note that it’s been very public. The call times, the wait for service, has been a very real problem in our community lately.

And I had an opportunity to speak with Chief Williams about this yesterday. And it’s not only the frontline constables that will be helping reduce those call times, but even some of the sergeant positions and the related positions in support will reduce those call times because right now they’re having to pull frontline officers off the frontline to fill in those support gaps. I spoke earlier, well, I guess it was last year now, I was gonna say earlier this year, but when the core unit had to have its officers reallocated to frontline services, the core unit is a wonderful example of proactive community-based policing. And I will tell you that the interactions that myself and constituents in Ward 2 have had with the core unit have been spectacular.

I’ve got nothing but positive things to say about how they’ve actually de-escalated and found community solutions to very localized neighborhood problems and truly appreciate the work that they’ve done. And I hope that by allocating this assessment growth that will increase some frontline officer presence as well as support staff, we’ll be able to see some of those officers start to move back into the more proactive community-based responses to things and certainly Chief Williams indicated that’s his hope as well. We’ve had success and I think that’s noted actually in the core area action plan update with the coast program and it’s still small, but it is working and it is getting results. But I think the other thing that’s really important for the public to understand, because we’ve had this discussion with them before.

City Council can’t change the Provincial Police Services Act and the resulting legislation. So when people say to me, well, police shouldn’t be responding to mental health calls. Well, legally they have to. And that’s not something this Council can change and it’s not something the Chief of Police can change.

It’s something that’s legislated at the province of Ontario. So while I agree with those who say it would be better if we had alternate responses to some of these calls rather than the police, absolutely. But we have to work within the framework that we’re in right now. We continue to have conversations I’m sure with the province as will the Chief about how changes can be implemented to reduce the pressures on policing and the need for more police and have alternate service delivery.

But right now we need these officers. So happy to see that some allocation is going there. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t compliment London Transit and the money that’s going into their ask and I know that Councilor Helmer has put a lot of work into making sure that services are going to get out to the industrial areas. And I understand that some of this funding allocation today will help deliver on that.

It’s been a long, long wait for the community to see that. But if this helps bring that forward, that’s great news for the community as well. So I think there’s some really smart investments in the nuts and bolts of our city here from garbage and recycling pickups in new neighborhoods to our sports fields and park maintenance to our police and transit services as well as our fire services. So very happy that we’re able to focus and bear down on some of these areas that need some improvements.

Councilor Turner. Mr. Presiding Officer, just a quick question on the carryover. I think I understand it so that the carryover value that came over from 2020, one into 2022 is based on the one-time funding that we did in 2021.

And then in 2022’s carries over into 2023 based on those one-time funds. It’s not a… You’ve created yourself right there at the end. It’s not something we just didn’t allocate.

Question mark. I’ll go to Ms. Berbal. Thank you through the chair.

Yes, that one-time carryover from the prior year, one-time funds are allocated for things that are capital in nature. So that has been available for carryover and is part of the funding for this year. And the remaining funds of 966 that is available from this year will be carried over into the following year and the one-time application of policy will be for the 2022 year. Thank you.

Perhaps just following up on Councillor Lewis’s comments. And it might not be the most appropriate time to ask, but since we’re here. The question ultimately of collateral services that might be able to decrease the burden of different calls on the police services really stems from an all agency approach and making sure that the resources are there to deal with social challenges, addictions, mental health and housing. And I know we’ve done a number of things on a number of different fronts.

Is there a coordinated effort in some way to identify how we can make sure that service area growth is appropriate and proportional to the areas of need rather than putting everything into place? I’ll start with Ms. Barbone and I’ll see who you need to bring out on that one. Thank you through the chair.

So the process for the allocation of assessment growth is based on the business cases and the need as it is put forward. So the allocation to any given service area could vary from one year to another based on the need that is demonstrated as part of the business case. So I believe historically police roughly are fairly consistent and I believe LTC, they tend to be very consistent based on the models that they use to allocate that growth. But it is certainly based on the need that is demonstrated in the business case and does vary.

So fire has had a number of, there are some years where there isn’t anything with fire ‘cause obviously when you build a new fire station those years of growth are significant and only happen every number of years. So there isn’t a very specific allocation other than based on what is supported through the business case. If there was insufficient business, if there are more business cases than the funding that is available then that would then be carried forward and then we would rely on the remainder of it being funded the following year. So sometimes assessment growth can be lumpy and it really does depend on the needs in a given year and the growth of the city each and every year that is specific to the services we provide.

Okay, Councilor. Just a quick follow-up, just perhaps to specify, that’s why I’m saying I don’t think it’s very specific to the assessment growth process but it flags a little bit because there’s a fair amount of investment required in place and understandable and it’s part of their service growth plan and that gets brought forward into the assessment growth considerations. But as Councilor Lewis was talking about, there are needs that the police need to be able to respond to, is there a comprehensive look to take a look at all level service areas to say how do we make sure that the response ends up getting shifted but the resources are there so that we can do the shift and are those service areas working together? Are social services and mental health and the province and police services all working together so that we don’t necessarily have to do straight line population increases to the resources that go into line and police?

Ms. Berbal. So through the Chair, some of that coordination would also occur through our annual budget update and through some of the other development that occurs in our budgeting exercises and projections also through future year estimates. So the budget monitoring exercise does flag issues and merging issues as they get brought forward and that factors into our planning for what also is incorporated through an annual budget update versus assessment growth.

So we try to maintain the assessment growth is very pure but there is the annual budget process as well as the multi-year budget process where we have those opportunities to realign where those needs are to ensure that the services can deliver effectively including our boards and commissions. Thank you, through you, Mr. Chair. I just say that the answers are helpful.

It sounds like it’s being approached from a financial perspective on a service level and what the availability and capabilities of the municipality are. I would recommend that it’s really important that we start to have interdepartmental discussions to try and figure out a strategy between those departments to figure out relative because I think each department is going to advocate for the resources they need independently rather than cohesively to make a plan that addresses social and mental health concerns within the community and not making it a place in response necessarily. So anyway, that’s all I’m trying to say but I think it’s probably a broader conversation for another time, thanks. Yes, and Councillor Turner, I will just add some context for you given where your question went.

I recently participated on behalf of the city with the city manager, the warden the CEO of the county, president of LHSC and representatives from the land ambulance service to talk about the types of things that you’re discussing, both from a joint advocacy perspective as well as from, for example, the way that mental health impacts all of those organizations and the different asks that we might have of the provincial government moving forward and how those asks interrelate to each other and how we can do some cross advocacy. So not quite exactly what you’re talking about but I think along the same lines where those conversations have started to happen between groups at a very high level and I know that the staff-to-staff interactions that came out of that have been very helpful as well and hopefully we’ll see the fruition of that in the coming months ahead. So I just wanted to add that context for you ‘cause it was a meeting I participated in. Thank you.

Other comments on the slate of items that we have before us? If not, if colleagues will indulge me, I did wanna make one comment on the assessment growth business case component and I’ll do that just briefly from the chair. One of the things that I think is easy to overlook is assessment growth business case number 21. Often we talk when reports come through Corporate Services Committee about our adherence to a long-term fiscal plan and sometimes that plan is very boring and does not get a lot of attention but this is the business case where we recognize that a growing city does mean that we have a growing capital and replacement needs.

And so this is a recognition of that at the front end of the need to contribute to the capital asset renewal and the replacement reserve funds to mitigate those future impacts on infrastructure growth at the time that we see the city growing. And so I think that this is something that started with the last assessment growth update. It continues into this one and I think it is a responsible way for council to approach taking another way to try to mitigate growth in the infrastructure gap by recognizing the costs of growth at the point that it’s incurred. So I wanted to draw colleagues’ attention to that as well as it’s something that’s been new in recent years and something that I think is easy to skip over but one of those things where you’re gonna see a lot of successful dividends, a few councils down the road and it won’t be something that we particularly see on this one but part of another component of that long-term prudent fiscal strategy that the city has with that.

And if there are no further comments, this has been duly moved and seconded. We are talking about 2.1, 2.2 and 2.4. If there are no further comments, we will open that for voting. Closing the vote, the motion’s passed 14 to zero.

This is 2.3, which is the core area action plan 2021 review. Councillor Hamou asked for that to be pulled. So perhaps I will go to you first, Councillor Hamou. Thank you, Chair.

I was looking at the report on Dundas Street and I’m really quite excited about it. We’re hopefully post COVID, I don’t wanna jinx it but hopefully we’re post COVID and I’m really sort of excited and want to get out there to Dundas place and I want to know what sorts of events are planned in 2022. This report has a team of deputy city managers who drafted it but I’ll go to Ms. Cher first to start that off and bring in anybody else who needs to on this one.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor Morgan. We do have a big team of deputy city managers involved as well as a big team of staff behind the scenes who’ve been working hard on this all year. So we’re just in the process of doing the planning efforts for the 2022 activities. I think that we’ve got a lot of opportunity to engage with groups around the community.

Folks, obviously, who’ve been users previously but as well, new users who’d be interested in holding and hosting events there. I’m gonna turn it over to Jimmy and Chula who’s our manager of core area and urban regeneration. His team is leading that process but it’s a very timely question because we’re just emphasizing the results of the community survey and getting excited for what we really, really hope is a post COVID year for activations as well. Mr.

Yanchula, go ahead. Thank you. Councilor, are you asking how many events or what kinds of events? So I’m actually looking at, I was just looking at the programming partners and I was wondering if there were any more programming partners and if there are some different types of things that are gonna be happening this year like because of the post COVID?

Well, we’re able to do much more than we have been able to do in the past because we have more staff to help us with it but the new things that are coming up will be in terms of partners are working with the Forest City Film Festival throughout the summer months that are coming up we’ll be having in by the time the winter comes we’ll be having another holiday festival. We’ve got elements of Sun Fest in home county doing presentations on Dundas Place. So some of the festivals that you’ve seen and other parts of the core are kind of sampling Dundas Place and that would be new for this year. That’s great.

I’m also hoping that there’s a bit of equity, diversity and inclusion work done here because again, looking at the partners there’s a lot of opportunities to do some work outside of kind of even the downtown maybe going into cultural communities to do things as well as the sports community. So I’m really excited to see what you guys have planned for this year. Thank you and if I may follow up on terms of equity and inclusion, I just didn’t happen to mention that in May we’re looking at a Middle Eastern cultural event we’ve got pride fest activities as well. So we’ve got those angles also in our sites.

Excellent, thank you. I can’t wait. Okay, I have Councillor Lehman next. Thank you, Chair.

Just a couple of questions regarding the COAS program for those listening, COAS is an acronym for Crisis Outreach and Support Team Program. With the recent reallocation of police resources specifically to the core unit, how has that affected this program? I’ll start with Ms. Sher and I think that you have other folks who can support the questions as well.

Indeed, we do, thank you Deputy Mayor Morgan. We actually have Lori Griffith who is the Director of Crisis and Access with CMHA and is involved with COAS here today. So if I can ask Ms. Griffith if she can weigh in on how things are going, certainly staff’s response with the program this year has been very positive.

We’ve seen really good outcomes and we’re glad to see that there’s opportunities to continue but I’ll pass it over to Ms. Griffith for her to provide better information. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. I just wanted to start by saying that just a reminder that the COAS program actually stands for Community, London Community Outreach and Support Team.

And we are in the middle of just wrapping up the end of the pilot process. As a result of the pilot, we’ve seen great success. On average, we’re about 120 to 140 unique individuals each month that have been had access to this program. And what we can say as we’re going forward is that all agency partners are actively pursuing sustained funding avenues to be able to extend the program permanently.

And we’re hoping to share positive news with the public in the near future. In the meantime, the partners have collaborated in a way that will allow the program to continue to operate past March 30th, 2022 with the longer-term plan while we establish a longer-term plan. So we look forward to COAS continuing to serve the needs of those who suffer from mental health and addiction crisis in our community. So I guess in short, what I can say is that we’re still committed and we’re seeing great successes and we’re still committed with our community partners.

Thank you. What quick note, we’d have to update the agenda ‘cause the note’s here as a crisis outreach. It’s fine. I’m still not clear on how the effect of the reallocation of police resources have affected this program.

Are you able to address that? So from our perspective, so I think that the LPS would probably do a better job at being able to articulate that, but from our perspective, it is our understanding that they in their budget have committed to having the funding continue to have the three officers that are supporting this program full-term. And so then the additional pieces in terms of the community partners finding that funding, that’s what we’re looking for to sustain it. Thank you.

My second question has to deal with the information that meetings were held with Minister of Health regarding this program, which I was really happy to read because I think for frustration has been issues or we see ongoing challenges with those suffering from mental health and addiction, not finding the reason versus within city mandates. Health is a provincial responsibility and it’s been frustrating not to see the province step up into this area. So I was happy to hear that we have initiated meetings with the Ministry of Health and I just wanna get a feeling of those that were involved in the discussions if they can address us if they’re here today. Are you getting a feeling that the province is getting the message that their responsibility is for mental health and addiction and that cities desperately need their increased assistance in this matter, which is this type of example is a great example of this.

I just would like to hear some comments on those discussions with the Ministry. Ms. Chair. Thank you, Mr.

Deputy Mayor. Mr. Thompson is here from our government relations team and he should be able to provide some context about how those conversations went with the provincial government. We also have Kevin Dickens here, of course.

So if there’s a need to talk a bit more about the content of those requests he’s available to. Mr. Thompson, maybe I’ll go to Mr. Dickinson.

We’ll be waiting to see if we can get Mr. Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Mayor.

The advocacy efforts by the city and by members of council have been well received at the Ministry level. While we don’t have anything finite or concrete to report back to, you’ll note in the report that this topic of coast and sustaining the coast program and ensuring it is around to support our community for a long time was a topic of interest at really any opportunity we had with the Ministry, whether it be through pre-budget submissions or through our annual delegation efforts. We have also taken the opportunity to engage the Ministry of Health around conversations related to a stabilization space in this community. And I will just echo that those advocacy efforts have also been well received at the Ministry level and the work continues at the staff level now to ensure that we advance those advocacy efforts in hopes of it resulting in a positive outcome for our community and for our community stakeholders that are so vital to providing these services to Londoners.

I don’t know if we have Mr. Thompson or not yet. I am here, Mr. Chair.

Okay. And through you just to add what Mr. Dickens was commenting on. So the conversations with the Ministry of Health have been sustained over the last number of years now.

I think what we’ve heard very clearly is the COVID-19 pandemic has sort of forced, I think, a lot of public servants and officials at all levels of government to sort of think about health as in very much new ways. What I can say about our conversations with the Ministry of Health is, we have prioritized, the City of London has prioritized both, well, has prioritized the funding for coast continuation and general health services in our pre-budget submission. That’s reflected in the report. The conversations have been quite positive, particularly with the Office of Minister Tobolo who heads up mental health and addictions ministry at the provincial level.

And there were some engagements up until last week with Minister Tobolo in his office between the mayor and the Minister. So we’re very much looking forward to the provincial budget that’s expected to be delivered in the next number of weeks as an important opportunity for the province to stake a claim on what the next few years are gonna look like. I’ll just say we’ve been very clear and focused in our advocacy around the pressing need for provincial support in these specific areas. Councilor I’ll add, Mr.

Thompson supported Councilor Castee and I last week at the FCM board meeting with the establishment of a new minister at the federal level for mental health. And in that mandate letter to establish a new mental health transfer, it is something that the community I chair at FCM has turned its mind to on how we will advocate on behalf of municipalities for as much flexibility as possible in that mental health transfer funding and that some of it will flow to municipalities to support the variety of programs that we execute at the local level. So I wanted to add to Mr. Thompson’s context is that there is now a federal angle on this approach as well to dealing with mental health that we are also pursuing.

Well, that’s really terrific to hear. Mr. Thompson, Mr. Dickens, thank you very much for your comments and for your advocacy on behalf of London.

And I’m glad to hear the federal government is recognizing this as well. ‘Cause the issues that we face in London, I see are faced by cities across Canada. And it’s a big challenge. We work hard as a council and city staff to address these challenges here in the court around the city.

But again, with a property tax base, it’s just, it’s frustrating because it’s just, resources are just not there, quite frankly. And we do need the other levels of government to step up, especially since health is clearly identified as outside the city’s purview. So thank you very much and appreciate the efforts there. Councillor Hopkins, my apologies, Councillor Hopkins, actually Councillor Fai familiar first, and then I’ll go to you and then I’ll go to Councillor Helmer.

Thank you, Chair, and through you first, I had some notes here. I’m not gonna cover what Councilor Layman’s already covered. I think we got some of the answers that we wanted to get there, which I think is fabulous. I do wanna say though, through this report, a couple of what I think are real bright spots in here, the ambassador program that we’re running downtown.

I think for anyone that spends a lot of time downtown, fabulous to see this ambassador program, it runs till 11 p.m. at night and I’ll tell you, you can find ambassadors on the streets at midnight downtown. There are a very dedicated group of individuals that are out there, very informative. They definitely stand out in the green coats.

So they’re pretty easy to find, but I think the ambassador program has been a real benefit into the experience of what the downtown is. I think the second one I wanna comment on is Project Clean Slate. I was very excited to see that there was an extension on this program. I think the partnership between the city and YOU, and not just what it’s meant for the downtown, but I think what it’s made for the individuals who are participating in this program is exceptional.

So a fantastic program, a fantastic addition to the downtown. I think a couple of other comments, one being that when we talk about the core program, we do a lot of discussing about Old East Village and about the downtown core. One of the pieces that we do tend to sort of miss in there a little bit is Midtown. And I think Midtown is one of those growing pieces.

We have a lot of residents in there. There’s going to be some planning applications that come forward for that area. So I think we have to be aware that this is also a growing area that’s part of this package. And one that I think sometimes just gets blended into a piece.

The last thing in here, there was a piece in here on engagements with core residents. And I think that tends to be extremely important as we go through this planning. One of the things when you talk about people, especially people that move to the high-rise areas in the downtown core, one of the reasons that I hear for people who come here and leave is because they’re not finding some things that they used to do, for instance, at their home. And I’ll use gardening as a prime example.

They’re looking for some of these things to engage in in the downtown core. So I think when we talk about engagement with core residents, I think it’s asking them what they want. But I also think it’s trying to engage with them to participate in some of the things that we need to make the downtown a better experience. Because I think we’ll find that for these people, this is their backyard at the end of the day.

And they’re more than excited to participate in some of these programs. But with that, I will say, I thought the review was great. And I guess on behalf of myself in joining this council in October, I want to say thank you to the people on this council that actually voted the core action plan in to begin with, because I think it’s been a real positive piece in our downtown. So thank you.

Thank you, Councilor Hopkins. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. And I want to thank staff for the report.

It’s quite interesting to see the work that’s already being done. It’s still the work that needs to be done, but there’s a lot of opportunities happening in our downtown core. And it’s really exciting to read about it. I do want to follow up on Councilor Layman’s questions around the funding piece.

And I’m going to just speak provincially. I’m glad to hear your comments, Mr. Chair, about FCM getting in on funding and supporting municipalities when it comes to mental health issues. But I want to expand on the great work that’s being done with COAST and the need for funding, representing the city of London at AMO.

It has been a concern with the AMA Board about who is responsible for health. And we all understand that it should be provincially that responsibility. And it really to me is important that advocacy continues to be had at not only at the federal level, but definitely at the provincial level. And I understand we’ve got a budget coming up and we’re probably all anticipating and waiting to see what is going to come to municipalities.

And it really is something that I’m hoping the provincial government is listening to groups out there. And really want to thank Mr. Thompson and Mr. Dickens for their comments as well, the advocacy of all municipalities, and especially here in the city that is happening at the provincial level.

I do want to follow up though with the one caution that we still have, which is the stabilization site. And waiting again for the funding. And I want to go through you Mr. Chair to staff.

I know we’ve revised a plan, we’ve got a site, we’re waiting the funding and waiting and waiting. And I really think and would like to know a little bit more about the revised plan and the importance of the stabilization site as well. So we can all advocate to other governments, the importance of funding. So if I could get a bit of an update on the revised plans for the stabilization site and concerns, if any, around the funding part.

Okay, I see, oh, Ms. Chair. And then Mr. Dickens is on camera too, so maybe you can take a team effort.

In fact, Mr. Chair, Mr. Deputy Mayor, I will turn it over to Mr. Dickens.

Thank you and through you, Chair. Thank you for the question. As you will note, a property was purchased. That was on the Sylvan Street property in hopes of using that space as a community stabilization space.

With the lack of funding and the need to advance other key projects, that site was repurposed for rapid housing and for affordable housing projects. I think, you know, looking back now, what we know about the COVID-19 impacts to congregate living settings and certain healthcare facilities, that type of property may not even have been as suitable as desired for this type of service. The current work that is happening is really twofold. It is advancing, as we’ve discussed, our advocacy efforts through the Ministry of Health and through the Minister responsible for mental health and addictions.

We have engaged our Ontario Health team, which was a direction coming from the Minister of Health for municipalities to work closely with their local health teams. We’ve done that. We’ve done that through our core area steering committee as well, where the co-chairs were invited guests to meet with staff, to meet with the BIA’s and the core area as well. From that, we were able to submit and receive a letter of support from the Ontario Health team for the concept of the stabilization space here in London.

So we are now at the phase where we’re working closely with community experts. As civic administration, it is our opinion that we are not the experts in designing what a mental health and addictions stabilization space would look like in terms of its core functions and its safety features and things like that. So we are working with some community partners who are experts in this field. And we have ongoing conversations with those community experts to help prepare us for more concrete ask to advance our efforts along with the ministry.

So some of those conversations are still in the infancy stage, but they are moving along quite nicely. And I would say the momentum is now in our favour. Thank you for that update. I really do appreciate it.

And thank you very much to all the advocacy that’s going on out there, not only within our city, but with community partners and the need for continuing the advocacy around the funding part of it as well. So thank you very much for all the work that’s going on. Councillor Helmer. Thank you.

Through to the chair, it’s a little bit late, but I wanted to just respond a little bit to what Councillor Layman was asking about in terms of the post-program. So there are three programs that are sort of closely related and sometimes get confused when it comes to the LPS. There’s the foot patrol program that happens often in the core area. Then there’s the core unit, which is the community oriented response unit, which is quite different.

It’s not a foot patrol unit. It’s more proactive policing, problem oriented policing. And then there’s the coast unit, which is new and was added by the new chief from existing resources, essentially the police reallocated money that would have been spent on a different building to store things and have a bit more space for operations into personnel. So we could staff up the police side of the coast response.

A big chunk of the funding for the overall coast team is coming from the health partners, right? And so the police are not providing any funding on that front. So the coast program is intact. The funding for that at the police side is intact.

And the units that have been reallocated on the police side by the chief, the community oriented response unit, the school resource officers and a few others, but the foot patrol is still in place and the coast unit is still in place. And I wouldn’t expect, at least in the short term, any changes to those things. So I just wanted to answer that as best as I could. I do because it’s come up.

First, I want to say this report on the core action plan is really well done. I think it shows the many, many things that we are trying to do to support the many issues that are going on in the core. And we’ve had both in the earlier discussion around assessment growth allocations and in this discussion here about some of these issues that are the most obvious in the core area, but actually are affecting a lot of people throughout London and the rest of the province. We’re talking a lot about things that are directly funded by the province and should be directly funded by the province.

And I just want to put it in context because for the three big areas of expenditure for the province, when it comes to mental health and addictions, it’s $1.7 billion a year. If you count the psychiatric hospitals, the specialty psychiatric hospitals, of which there are several in Ontario, it’s like around $2.5 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, I suppose, but that $1.7 billion, I mean, that’s only 110 bucks per person per year going into mental health all throughout the entire province. And we have some really serious challenges in front of us in terms of mental health.

And I don’t think that we’re going to, in fact, I know we’re not going to be able to police our way out of mental health problems. And police are often called into these situations because it’s a 24/7 service that people answer the phone when you call, but it is not the best way to respond. It’s not providing the support and specialized training personnel that people need when they’re in a mental health crisis in many cases. And so we need to convince the province, who is the funder of mental health initiatives, that they need to be doing not just like a little bit more on mental health, incrementally better, but like dramatically better, right?

That is the way to take the pressure off of many of these issues that are manifesting in the core as being associated with either mental health or addictions. And it’s not something that the city is going to be providing directly, unfortunately, we have had to do a number of these things and enter into some of these areas operations because nobody else is doing it. And we really need to step up and push the province to fund the agencies in our community that are in the best position to deliver those services effectively. They know in many cases exactly what needs to be done and they need the resources to be able to do that.

And I don’t think we can ignore the related issue of housing and just the lack of options for people and it’s pushing them out onto the street. And that is really intensified over the period that this core area action plan, the initial one has been underway. And in many cases, you know, the increased pressure of more and more people on the street with no places to go, no decent place to be living shelters that are really struggling to keep up with the pandemic and many of these pressures all happening at the same time. It’s remarkable that the situation is not even worse, you know, and I think it’s because of the core area action plan that we’ve been able to make things a little bit better than it would have been otherwise.

And I wanna commend everybody who’s involved, you know, the co-esteem partners, everybody’s involved in the core area action plan. It’s already been mentioned by several people, a number of these programs, like Clean Slate, it’s a really great initiative. And it was really started and launched and executed very quickly in very challenging circumstances. So I wanted to commend everybody who’s been involved in it.

I think we’re gonna have to maintain something like this for quite a while. And, you know, in the next month of your budget, there’s gonna be some difficult decisions to be made. I think having good information about how these programs are working, which ones we should be building on, which ones maybe we should be moving away from is really important as we’re kind of learning and making this intervention better and more successful. So thank you.

Other speakers, Councilor Turner. Thanks, through you, Mr. Chair, just a quick question about the restaurant patios. Thanks, Councilor Helmer for a very thorough and important discussion on policing, coast and core area action plan.

Just in a lot of the identified work plan in here, it talks about the fees for patios and making those easier. Is there, part of the fees is on a temporary basis. One of the key components that made the patio successful over the past couple of years was being able to address the ratios of indoor seating versus outdoor seating. Is there any opportunity for that to be explored on a permanent and ongoing basis to dispense with those requirements of the ratios?

Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Mayor.

We are certainly exploring a number of things through the back to business program and the core area action plan that have worked well to find ways to streamline and improve those processes on a longer term basis, specifically with respect to ratios in the patio. I’m gonna turn that over to Mr. Mathers, whose team is responsible for that portfolio of working to provide you some more details. Through the chair, absolutely.

We really wanna focus on those things that we’ve been able to bring forward and have been helpful and have actually been useful for the community. So this is one of those items. And so expect to see from us in the future more information about this, but I think this has been a really great opportunity to be able to trow a lot of different initiatives that maybe in the past were that there was concerns over and that’s why some of these limits and costs were brought about. So yet we’ll be able to see from us in the future some more information on this, but we really wanna keep what’s working for the downtown.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for that. I would recommend if possible that some of this accelerated to those who have had opportunities to explore with these patios and be successful with them.

I might wanna make some infrastructure investments to make those more permanent and have the knowledge that they could do so in a way that didn’t mean that the infrastructure that they were purchasing or putting in place was temporary or a floor quality because it might sunset at the end of this year or last year, for example. So, but, and I only raise it because it’s not mentioned explicitly in the report to speak specifically to fees and things like that, but this one is something within our regulatory realm that we could easily address. And I’m sure there’s probably some rationale for why that ratio existed in the first place, but perhaps there’s an administrative way we can address that and allow some more latitude to those businesses. Thanks.

Okay, other speakers? If not, I need a mover and a seconder for this particular report. I see Councilor Van Holst and Councilor Hopkins willing to move and second it, Councilor Van Holst. Thank you very much, Mr.

Chair. And I wanted to ask through you to our staff about marketing the activities on Dundas Place. As I looked through there, I saw a lot of great things and I did try and come down when I heard about the events that were happening. I thought a great job was done.

They were fun as I looked through the report. There was one moment of disappointment for me is that I missed the salsa dancing classes. So I hope those happen again and I’ll certainly be out there. But can I ask our staff, what are we gonna be doing to perhaps expand the communication so that people beyond the downtown area know that these things are going on and they can come down and participate?

Mr. Chair, thank you, Mr. Deputy Mayor. So we do have a dedicated team who’s providing communications and promotional support to the Quarry Action Plan, including to the activities on Dundas Place.

One of the things that we’re really hoping we can do this year which were challenged to last year because of the changing pandemic restrictions is get a lot of advanced notice, really publish those schedules early so people can make their plan, make a plan to come down and to the core and make a day of it and know what’s going on on different weekends. Unfortunately, last year we did have to do a lot of our promotions a little bit closer to the event because we weren’t always sure what we were going to be able to do in terms of capacity closures, restrictions, those sorts of things. We do a lot of heavy social media push, both just regular as well as some paid social media and we certainly want to work with the partners who are providing some of these events and activations to have them amplify and us amplify for them the activities that are coming up. So as we continue to build the programming strategy for Dundas this year, we will have a communications promotion plan that goes hand in hand for those activities.

Great to hear, thank you. Okay, last call for further speakers. Okay, it’s moved and seconded. We’ll open that for voting.

Sir Salih. I’ll vote manually, yay. Closing the vote, the motion’s passed 14 to zero. Thanks colleagues.

That brings us to the end of consent items. We have no scheduled items. So we’ll start moving through the items for direction. 4.1 is a development charge area, rating policy review, recommended approach.

Perhaps I’ll start by seeing if there’s a mover and a seconder for that and then we can open it up for questions and comments from our staff, or from our colleagues for our staff. I see Councillor Hamou and Councillor Van Holst willing to move in second that. Are there questions for staff? Councillor Turner.

Thanks Mr. Chair, three to staff. As I read through the report, one of the things that seem to be missing and I think is really important for this report is the climate lens and the climate toolkit. And was that applied or considered as this report was prepared?

And if so, what implications might that have in the recommendations? Mr. Chair, it’s Paul Yeoman. The climate change lens wasn’t explicitly considered through the area rating discussion that’s before you tonight.

However, it is part of the overall DC study that we are undertaking and the master plans that are informing that as well. So each of the master plans will be considered climate change considerations and impacts related to future infrastructure needs. And we’ll be factoring that into the various cost estimates and a recoverable framework that will be before you when the DC study comes forward for 2025. Thank you, Mr.

Yeoman. So the reason I asked last to, when we last spoke as Council or as committee discussing the climate emergency action plan, one of the things that I raised and I think might have been misconstrued at the time and I tried to clarify was that we have the ability to use some regulatory tools. Not necessarily that we’d go and punish people or slap them with fines for things, but that the way we grow as a city is probably one of the biggest impacts that we have on climate. And Greenfield land development is the number one of that large urban and suburban sprawl.

Single family homes on new Greenfield properties is not consistent with our intensification efforts. So perhaps, Mr. Yeoman, you could help me a little bit, but my understanding is that if a new home, say a 2,000 square foot home is built in old South on a vacant parcel within the neighborhood, the development charges would be the same as a new 2,000 square foot home, the identical architecture and land parcel size on a Greenfield wall, is that correct? Okay, Mr.

Chair, that is correct. The intensification contribution or framework for this analysis was one of the options that was looked at. We do have the consultants that prepared the memo that’s before you with us tonight. We have Craig Bidding and Julius Iraqi from Henson consultants.

They might be able to elaborate a little bit more on this matter for you, Councillor. And so I’ll look to them if they’d like to speak. Great, thanks. What I’ll do before they speak is I’ll just put a really clarifying question in there.

One of the things that in the report it talks about is it says that the potential for the DCs in an interior parcel could be higher than they would be because of the complexity of the build and where the infrastructure might be. It’s already in an established neighborhood, so it’s harder to put some infrastructure in place than it would be in a Greenfield where you can just dig the holes and put them in because you don’t have anything to move around and there’s nothing to conflict with it. I get that. But what I don’t understand is that that would happen on occasion and in the most circumstance, the infrastructure already exists.

We put that new house, that 2,000 square foot house down in Old South, the pipes, the roads, they’re already there. In some circumstances, we might have to put new infrastructure where there was more intensification than the existing infrastructure that would handle. So I’m wondering in that context because that seemed to be part of the recommendation for not going in that path. And I’m not really seeing how that might hold true in most cases.

Yes, Craig Benning here from Hemsen. I’d be pleased to provide an initial response. My colleague, Julia, may want to join in on the discussion. We’re working increasingly with urbanizing municipalities across the country when it comes to the respect of development costs, recovery mechanisms, and increasingly we’re finding that in those build up areas, when you look comprehensively at the infrastructure needs, both dealing with drainage or stormwater management, and then the linear infrastructure that increasingly we’re having to upsize facilities and they become very expensive.

Yes, they maybe aren’t predominant across the entire built area, but they do impact on that. And then also with respect to the information and data that we had available from the city in our dialogue with the city engineering staff is that some of the infrastructure, especially as it relates to stormwater management, although may not be physically located within the built up area, is designed to accommodate some of those downstream means that are generated from the flows that are going to be occurring within the built up area, which become even more intensified as increased density and intensification occurs. Julia, I’m not sure if you want to add anything to that comment. Sure, so I can just confirm that we undertook a high level analysis of the city’s previous capital plans.

And we didn’t see any evidence that there would be reduced cost situation in the city’s central areas. So yes, I think it’s a good point that if you did want to go the route of incentivizing development downtown, that’s definitely something that can be done, but in our view, this would be something that would need to be done through an incentive, essentially a discount in the DC rates, which would of course mean less revenues for the city. So there would be trade-offs there. But our analysis was based on the actual calculation of the rates, which is based on the servicing costs in each of these areas.

Thank you to you both through Mr. Chair. So this is where my concern lies, right? Is that you’ve got two options.

One, you can take a look as just stated, we could incentivize through discounting as we do in our downtown core and in old East. But the trade-off for that is it comes from taxes versus if you do it through rate adjustments, then the cost of development comes from development. So it’s a question of whether existing residents pay for new development or whether the new residents pay for the new development. And so that’s where you have to kind of balance it.

You stated that this was at a high level. I mean, I’m thinking about on average, the infrastructure already exists in the core or in the built area and it doesn’t exist in other areas. So could you comment a little bit on the subsidization of development in existing built area of the development that happens on the periphery? Because it’s been averaged out the development charges regardless of where you are.

And our current approach of inside and outside the urban growth boundary, well, we can’t really develop outside of the urban growth boundary anywhere. You’re not seeing new tracts of homes and things like that. So it doesn’t impact in any material way what the average DC is for a single family home. So there is an inherent subsidy that exists for greenfield homes on the basis of averaging it out and an intensification ends up getting hit with the same costs regardless of whether they need new infrastructure or not to support it.

Mr. Yeoman. If I could, Mr. Chair, but just before Mr.

Benning and Ms. Saraki answer that question, I just need to provide a bit of a technical clarification. So when we’re looking at the services that are under review for the area rating memo before you tonight, they are only for water distribution sanitary service and not treatment and stormwater management. So it’s a certain selection of DC services.

I think it’s also important to note there’s a difference between the local services that are available that’s right in front of development that’s occurring versus the regional system that we’re looking at from the DC perspective as well. And the last point I’ll add to is that when we established our intensification targets and our intensification areas going forward, they were done for a number of really important planning reasons and planning considerations, but we didn’t actually look at where do we have service and capacity across the city and actually allocate the growth to those locations. So there are a number of service and considerations and costs that are coming forward with growth in the future that are going to be covered through DCs. With that, I’ll turn things over to Mr.

Benning and Ms. Saraki. Yes, just to reiterate that, you know, from the information and the data that we had available, we couldn’t see the correlation of having sufficient capacity that didn’t have cost associated with it in the infill area. We still see based on the material provided to us through city staff that there would be infrastructure improvements within those services, just outlined by Mr.

Yeoman and that from a cost perspective, we weren’t seeing resulting lower rates within the built up area. And so we’re not seeing cross subsidization between the built up area into the more suburban style development occurring. And that’s fairly consistent with what we’re finding with other similar municipalities here in Ontario and elsewhere. That’s interesting, Mr.

Chair. So, I mean, about, I think around 35 to 40% of our recent or sorry, around 30% to 35% of our recent development has been in the built area boundary. So, somewhere in the neighborhood of a third, the infrastructure costs associated with those new developments, the actual costs versus the averaged out costs, do we see those as materially different between that and greenfield development or was that analysis taken? So I can just add a bit of detail here.

So, I mean, we looked at the various engineered services and the potential to introduce an area right on that basis. So, there were some serious challenges in terms of delineating service areas, which is a really important piece when we’re undertaking this analysis and calculating DCs. And so really what it comes down to is there are very limited opportunities to delineate those services in any real reliable and straightforward way. We definitely found the sewer catchment areas, or sorry, the sanitary service areas to be quite integrated from what we’ve seen in the city’s capital programs.

The only real opportunity would be potentially the stormwater catchment areas. Those are kind of have a bit of a stronger delineation, but we did highlight in our memo that there are some real concerns there, just considering that the city has this kind of long held and well-established practice of charging on a city-wide basis. And there would be some real inequities there. Certain areas have benefited from the city wide rates for a long time where other areas are coming to the point now where they require a significant investment and growth-related infrastructure, and they haven’t benefited from that history.

So it’s difficult to introduce a rate kind of at this point where you have all of that history in that past development, versus a situation where you have something like an expanded urban growth area, boundary where it’s kind of a clean slate, a fresh green field area that has really distinct needs. And in that situation, in many cases, it does make a lot of sense to introduce an area specific rate. So that’s kind of a bit more background on our rationale there. Thank you.

So the option for me is the most appealing and for me makes the most sense. Or sorry, we could even, it’s our option for is probably more complex with the service area, but an intensification area rate starts to make a bit of sense, because I’m not quite sure what policy tools we have at all other than a general statement that says that we’re going to target a certain amount of intensification to actually achieve intensification other than market demand. And that concerns me a little bit. So we have a few different options that we consider.

One policy tool would be to make it more expensive and actual realized true costs of development out in suburban areas and allow for the incentive of a reduced rate because it’s real cost of development within built areas. We could take a look at subsidizing it ourselves, which becomes more expensive and not as practical because we do already have policy areas such as downtown and old East where we are trying to support and incentivize residential development. But we should be doing that for in general for all the areas within the intensification boundary. So that’s why I’m concerned.

I mean, I’ve been a big advocate for area ratings and I’m glad we were able to go and take a review. I find this a little too high level in terms of review in terms of our ability to really be able to tell whether this would be a policy tool that would be effective for us in helping to focus intensification in the built area and to some degree discouraging or at least putting true cost on suburban development. And in from the climate emergency action plan lens, these are the kind of things that we need to consider. And the development policies of the city and how we do that and how we try to consolidate our land form are going to be key to that.

And that’s why I’m concerned not to see that lens applied to this explicitly and from what I’m seeing as I read through, we took a look at our comparators in other municipalities and most of them aren’t doing it either. But that’s the thing. There’s this institutional inertia that nobody’s ventured out and said, let’s try something different that might be able to address sprawl in terms of actual policies and making it on monetary policy. And this is the way we’re gonna have to tackle.

The climate emergency action plan, I was concerned about because it really put too much on the individual and individual choice. We need to be able to take policy level actions at the municipality to be able to have strong impacts. I’ll stop talking for right now. I’d be really intrigued to hear what my colleagues say.

But I’m hearing that the two things that are keeping us from going down the path of area ratings specifically and taking a look at an intensification area rate are one, administrative burden, and two, nobody else is doing it. So it’s going to be perhaps unfair in certain circumstances and not comparable to other peers. Those to me aren’t strong enough reasons for us not to go and pursue this a little bit further. Councilor Manholst.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I appreciate Councilor Turner’s analysis as I always do. It’s in depth and brings up some very good points.

I looked through this and I think from this high level drew the same conclusions as staff. Is that looking at the an intensification area rate would introduce a level of complexity that may not really pay off. We can certainly change the levels of DCs being paid in different areas. That would redistribute the funds to an extent.

But I don’t know if it would in the end make a difference to what got built. And so of course our big goal is to make sure that we cover the costs of the infrastructure that’s needed for the city. What we have now does that the most important thing. I think is that we have that difference between the inside and outside the urban growth boundary.

But there was, I’m glad we got to see these different options. But again, I don’t know that they would, that would make a big difference. I don’t think that it would stop single dwelling homes being built on Greenfield because that’s what people would want. And they would likely be willing to pay the extra amount for it.

Simply look at what people are paying for houses now. They’re in demand and they’ll continue to be in demand. And I think we’ll still see some intensification happening inside the city as well. And I think to make that happen quicker, there may be other things we can look at simply getting the red tape through and assisting because those are, as Councilor Turner described and staff, those can be trickier developments to undergo.

So I was happy to move that. And happy to continue the discussion ‘cause it’s an interesting one to see what’s possible here. But I do think there can be diminishing returns with policy introduction. And I think it looks like that’s what we would be into here.

So thank you. Further speakers, Councillor Hopkins. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair.

And I’ve been listening quite closely to my colleagues’ comments. And I really thank the consultants for being here and providing further information. I read this report. I really felt it was too at a really high level.

And I wasn’t sure what we were recommending. And finally came to the conclusion that it’s just keeping the status quo. And I think we need to do more. And Councillor Turner spoke quite well around the climate change and how can we pursue this further as opposed to maybe a bit of a debate, which way to go here.

But is there, and maybe this is directed to Mr. Yeoman ‘cause he did speak to the overall DC study that this will inform, which really concerns me as well too. So is, can we pursue this further, this conversation around area growth? Mr.

Yeoman. Thank you, through you, Mr. Chair. So first of all, I want to articulate that I’m a big fan of precision in getting to the truth and things.

Whenever we do any DC matters, of course, it is very challenging when we have considerations related to true cost, accounting or true cost for servicing. It’s very challenging to actually do a one-to-one relationship or even anything close to that for development in relation to the servicing costs. And that’s why you see a lot of the averaging that’s done for a DC perspective. When you look at the complexities of the rate calculations that are involved.

In terms of Councillor Hopkins’ questions about the decision point this before you tonight, we are recommending by virtue of the recommendation clauses that we do maintain the current approach. And that would inform then the structure that we bring forward with the DC master plans that we’re putting together in the eventual rate calculations as well. So our window of considering this is rapidly closing because there’s subsequent decisions that have to be made based on that framework as we work towards preparing the overall study. 2025 seems like it’s a fair way as a way, but we have quite a bit of work to do in the next awhile, especially in the technical side to get new draft rates before that time.

Thank you for that information. And I do have one more question around with this study and it was touched upon a little bit about the exemptions and how we do things here in the city. DC exemptions being downtown or the east and how that’s all taken into account and leveled out. Was there any information that you found or maybe this is through you Mr.

Chair to the consultants on how to do it a better way or just general comments in our incentive programs, if any that you found through this study. I’m gonna start with Mr. Yeoman and then let him throw it over to the consultants where necessary. Thank you, Mr.

Chair. Yes, Mr. Benning and Ms. Saraki can probably speak to what they looked at and other municipalities as well.

Just to provide some clarity for Council. And 2014 Council made a pretty important distinction going forward related to how it handled DC incentives. So generally they were considered the time of your DC study when we were actually doing our rate calculations ‘cause as I’m sure you can appreciate DCs are really about looking at the growth that’s occurring in the city and then how much is that gonna cost and doing a cost recovering mechanism related to that. So we actually managed to hive off the incentives conversation to a community improvement plan approach to grant approach for the various areas as well.

This provides Council a lot more flexibility to consider how they wanna tailor those tools, how focused they want to be. There’s plans associated with them as well too. And they don’t have to be considered on a five year window which the DC study generally is here a lot more nimble in how you actually deliver and target your incentives for development. So Council decided that was the appropriate tool and approach to be going for at that time.

That’s what we’ve continued to maintain with our colleagues in planning and development. I’ll turn things over to Mr. Bidding and Ms. Rack if they wanna have more.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Yeoman, and through the chair, just the process that we’ve described is one that we recommend to our clients is to do things through the CIP processes and related documents. It gives you much more flexibility and nimbleness. There’s a number of our clients who have these exemptions and incentives built into the bylaws and they’re transitioning them out of the development charge bylaws and into these other tools which are more, in my opinion, more comprehensive and deal with a full range of planning and other kinds of incentives and encouragements to attract those kinds of developments.

So, London is a good example in my opinion. We didn’t overly focus on the incentives and incentive discount side of things. We were trying to look at it from the technical analysis of meeting the tests and the requirement of the act whereas if you’re gonna area rate and differentiate, you have to be able to substantiate the allocations from one area to the other. I’ve been involved in some of the most complex DC area rating that’s gone on in the province and I spent a lot of time with developers trying to, ‘cause as soon as you make a delineation, you’re shifting a share to one developer which has higher rates.

And you have to be able to strongly substantiate those because these bylaws are available to the tribunal and that could be a very much an area of focus is the allocation and attribution of costs to different geographic areas and to different types of development. And that was part of the messaging that Mr. Raki and I were looking at through the lens as we analyzed the situation there in the city of London. Thank you for this information.

I appreciate it. For the speakers. Councilor Helmer. Thank you.

I appreciate the discussion so far. I’m not really convinced that we should keep things the way they have been for so long. I wanted to do a brief little story because I think it illustrates some of the problems with the way the DC bylaw structure of now and how we’re handling area rating right now. There’s a very small scale developer who’s trying to turn a building that has two units in it and do a unit that has four units in it.

So he’s trying to double the number of dwelling units in a building under the current DC bylaw and the way we handle things. One of those units is exempt from DC charges and the fourth one essentially is charged. The building envelope is not changing at all. So he’s basically leaving the building envelope exactly how it is and he’s changing it from two units into four units.

He has to pay DCs on one of the four units. The first two are already there. The third one is exempt and the fourth one you have to pay. And essentially this developer is paying the cost for that fourth unit.

There’s no actual growth costs associated with adding a fourth unit into this building. None whatsoever. It’s in an existing built area. The building envelope’s not even changing.

There’s basically nothing. Maybe some soft service impacts ‘cause there’s more people in the area, very minor. This person is paying for stormwater ponds on the other side of town, right? And it just makes no sense.

And so when people are looking at doing projects like that, small scale and densification, leaving inside the existing building, not hugely expensive, they’re being charged these fees that are really for things that they don’t benefit from whatsoever. And that is the way the current system is set up. Now, if you happen to be a bigger developer and you’re in the area where we have the grant program, of course, you pay nothing. And so the small scale developer is paying the development charges where a big developer is building a big building downtown is paying nothing for development charges because we have the grant program.

So there’s some elements of we are changing the cost of development for certain kinds of developments and certain kinds of developers. And if we want to align our approach to DCs with what we’re trying to do in the London plan in terms of how growth is going to occur, I do think we have to be looking at area rating for these services specifically. And it is very confusing to me and I think this is where I have some questions because calling to an involved in approving the DC by-law like there’s a whole bunch of capital projects in the DC by-law that are organized in the DC by-law and the study that informs it into built area works and growth. There’s a very clear delineation.

And in some cases, like stormwater, the community growth ones are a hundred million dollars and the built area ones are $60 million. So they’re both big. There’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of projects, but they’re not the same number. And it seems to me like it’s kind of simple to assign, look, these ones that we are, they’re in the built area, the benefit of the built area, they could go in the built area one and the ones that are community growth.

And we know they’re community growth and they benefit the community growth area, they go that way. And maybe we don’t move everything else, everything else can stay where it is. But these things that are very obviously associated with community growth areas, stuff that’s on the outside of the built area boundary versus things that are on the interior of the built area boundary that we could move at least those things. And maybe the rates in the end are not hugely different because these are only, we didn’t look at roads and roads is half of the whole DC, but it still would move it a little bit and it would align the real costs for the development in those kinds of areas and make it a bit fairer overall.

And frankly, align better with the London plan approach to intensification and we’re done upward. So I just wanted to ask about that. Like these categories we already have in the DC by-law that has been approved and wasn’t appealed, saying these are community growth and these are built area projects, why wouldn’t we just adjust those and have rates that just accounted for those differences in the case of storm water, the difference between 108 million and 62 million? Mr.

yeoman. Through you, Mr. Chair. So it’s a very good question.

It’s one that we often do struggle with when we look at things conceptually and when we’re dealing with people better coming in at the counter as well. I’ve talked to a number of business owners and residents over the years about the DC charges for their property. When you talk about the distinction between the projects that are identified in the study for built area works versus the supposed greenfield projects that are identified as well. The big issue that we run into is that at face value they do seem like they are different services but they are networked into each other.

So facilities that are located on the greenfield areas, they’re actually providing quality controls but they’re also providing quality control as well to make sure that things don’t get blown out as the water continues down the Thames and goes to the forks as well. So it is a networked system, even though they’re individual ponds. The other thing too is when you look at water, for example, water is a networked and pressurized system throughout the city where one area affects all of the others as it goes forward. And then for sanitary, we haven’t had a situation where we’re building, for example, a new wastewater treatment plant that has an obvious benefiting area or then extending the services out.

It’s all networked into the various treatment plants that we have as well. So it’s not as easy to do that sort of very clear delineation between the two as you’d think that it would be to some of the points that Mr. Benning made. Yeah, so I guess I realize that there’s all these services are networked.

It’s who pays the costs for adding to the network. And usually, like when it comes to roads, for example, there’s pretty well established patterns of travel when you add a subdivision on the west edge of London, for example, yes, people will use the roads in that area and the local roads, right? Those are paid for directly. And then you’ve got the expansions, right?

Like going from two lanes to four lanes where you’re gonna, people are gonna generally come into the city, right? So the existing network is taking on all the additional congestion of the new areas. And, you know, the benefit for the expansion is definitely the ones to the west, right? So, you know, when we expand the road network, we’re really expanding it to benefit those new neighborhoods that are coming in.

And I think it’s very clear that that’s where the costs should be born rather than sort of sharing it across with, say, the whole other side of the city where it’s very unlikely that there’s a lot of trips all the way across the city that people are gonna go access. So I think for some services, it can be very hard to sort of really precisely disaggregate who’s benefiting and how. But I don’t know that that means we shouldn’t try, you know? And some of them, I think we should only really be looking at the ones that can be very well defended.

And if we’re not making hugely impactful changes in the rates, right? So if we just were to judge us, some of them, just looking at a ballpark, it’s not hugely consequential. I don’t think to the overall rates that people would be paying. I don’t know that people are so interested in fighting that out.

They would have just as hard time saying it doesn’t benefit them as we would defending that it does. And, you know, unless it was really big change, I really have a hard time thinking that that’s gonna be something that’s disputed extensively. And I think having looked at the projects and the way they’re organized, it’s really storm water and to a lesser extent water, but not really wastewater. You know, I don’t think wastewater, I think it’s hard because of the way the treatment plants are set up.

I think that’s one of the hardest, hard to aerate it. Storm water though, I don’t know. Like I think that’s pretty obvious. Those ponds are very expensive and putting one in, you can visually see like who’s benefiting from this pond.

So I guess at this point, I’m not gonna support the recommendation. The bigger picture point I wanna make about this is that regardless of how we handle the DC aerating, and I think, you know, the current way we’re doing it is not terrible. I think we can improve on it if we did a little bit of aerating. I do think we have to look at wider geographic expansion of exemptions and grants.

And so if we wanna focus intensification, if we wanna remove barriers to more gentle intensification, I think we have to look at changing that, right? So we’re exempting the first unit right now when people are doing the kind of thing I talked about at the beginning. Maybe we need to look at exempting more of them because it is, it’s not just residential either, right? Like I talked about that at the beginning, but even when you change an old industrial building to something else, you get change with change of use DC and you’re like, I’m basically bringing the same number of people into this building as it was before.

It’s the same building. Why am I paying like hundreds of thousands of dollars? In fees for something I’m not getting, the notes are no more benefits to high services. So I think we’re gonna have to look at more, more exemptions and more grants.

And although that deals with this unfairness in a different way and in some ways it’s better, it’s more obvious what we’re doing. I think that has the same problem, which is we’re still saying, look, these areas are not benefiting from the additional services, they shouldn’t bear the cost, we’re gonna exempt them. And if that’s really what we’re doing, why aren’t we just aerating, right? And so that’s my general comment.

I’m not gonna support, especially the last part, which is I think really a setup to say, we’re gonna have urban growth boundary expansion. And the way to contain the costs for development as said, they’re in growth boundaries, don’t expand it. No new development, don’t put any services out there, stay as farmland. And I mean, I don’t think that’s a good idea.

I don’t think we should be thinking about having two rates out there, one of which might go up in the future as we start building growth projects out there to support new residential development, because that’s an area where we don’t want new residential development. So whole point of the urban growth boundary. So I’m especially gonna vote against the last part of the recommendation. But I do think we’ve done a good job of looking at it.

I have a really hard time with the argument about sort of fairness over time to the various developers. That really doesn’t hold any water with me whatsoever. Changing it and being able to defend who’s benefiting and who’s not, I think is good. But if we bought into that kind of argument, we would never change anything.

We’d be like, well, it was like that 10 years ago, so it can’t change it. And I just don’t think that that’s, I don’t think that that makes sense. And we can’t be so path dependent that we’re stuck with the way we’re doing things forever. Council Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Just really quickly, Councilor Halmer raised a really interesting and good point on this, perhaps from Mr. Yeoman.

When we look at development charges in general, especially for new growth, there’s a component of that that it’s not fully borne by the developers. There’s a component that is borne by the levy, that by the municipality, because it recognizes that there’s a municipal interest and general use that goes for existing residents and then the remainder, the balance. What is that for you? Through you, Mr.

Chair. So that varies with each service. And so, for example, community centers and some of our parks look on, look at geographically, how much areas currently built in relation to the area, like the physical area that’s being built coming forward. Transportation, I believe, bases it on population and some of the road condition assessments that they have as well.

I believe water and wastewater works at population as well. But I think virtually each one of them has a different growth, non-growth methodology that they’re using. That is one of the reviews that we’re actually going to be undertaking as part of this DC study is comprehensively looking at all of the growth, non-growth sports and how we approach that as well, which Council endorsed part of the initiation report last year. Yeah, thank you.

So that kind of illustrates that we’re already doing it, right? We’re doing this growth, non-growth calculation on an ongoing basis on a very specific service level. So that same kind of concept extends fairly well to the idea of intensification area ratings because you can make those same arguments and use a very similar calculation. I hope I’m not trivializing the amount of work and complexity of DCs.

I totally understand that. Like I would not want to be playing with the spreadsheet to figure it out. But I hope and I urge my colleagues to defeat the recommendation. I know a lot of work is if it’s defeated, then I would look towards staff to help try and figure out a path forward that would make a sound recommendation that would help us get towards area ratings, at least on the intensification, non-intensification basis because I think this is critical from a climate to a standpoint from a city growth standpoint, from a sustainability standpoint and towards just general fairness.

And Councillor Halmer raised some really good examples of inequities. And so the report talks about fairness, but it’s really, let’s talk about the unfairness that exists in the current system, which is profound. Thank you. Thank you so appreciate the debate again.

And if we’re looking at voting down the recommendation, then I might, through you, Mr. Chair, to our staff, ask what the implications of that would be, how long would it take to make a change and then come back with something different? What kind of options would we need to have? And regarding the urban growth, outside the urban growth boundary, what would happen if we asked staff not to look into that further, because that’s the recommendation, continuing review analysis of the area rating where service needs to be extended in order to accommodate anticipated development.

So I guess they were looking at anticipated development things that are planned or expected in the future, where again, I think there’s many people that hoped to be on that boundary in some places. We would be keeping that farmland because it’s valuable, if it’s value in its own right. So I guess through you, perhaps I can ask, what would the implications of perhaps voting down B or C, B to the staff and council? Mr.

yeoman. Through you, Mr. Chair, so if B were to be defeated, we would look to have some sort of direction to proceed going forward. I think you’d need to have some sort of either referral on an option that was preferred by Council for us to explore.

And we would seek to endeavor to get that back to you before the summer because as I mentioned, it is critical to have this determination before we get too far into other aspects of the study. In terms of item C, the urban growth boundary piece, we included that because as it was noted in the consultant’s memo and looking a lot of other municipalities, generally area rates have been introduced when municipalities have expanded their boundary and have added new lands and that have had explicit servicing costs related to those areas as well. So we wanted to provide that as an alternative for council consideration should council go in that path in the future. But I will note that a comprehensive review has not been initiated.

No determination has been made on that in the future. So if no action were taken related to that item, it would not have any effect on the 2025 DC study. Okay, thank you, thank you. Although there we would be getting an area rating.

I did have another question and it’s regarding the storm water. Of course, if there’s a new development that obviously there’s a storm water component that is specific to that area. Mind you, if we were to say pull that, some somehow pull that out and say, well, that particular development pays for its own storm water separate from the development charges, which I wonder if that is something like that as possible. I know that we could still see that an adjacent area might need to take advantage of the same storm water strategy.

So that might make it a little difficult to parcel it out that way. But nevertheless, can I ask what’s the possibility of doing that since it seemed to be clearly the thing that’s associated directly with a particular development? Mr. yeoman.

Yeah, through you, Mr. Chair. So one of the important items that Council needs to consider with its development charges study is the local service considerations. So that’s the line that we draw between what is recovered for through DCs, which we consider the city wide infrastructure.

And then what are the local costs that are more directly attributable to development? In terms of storm water management, there are a number of municipalities that actually have storm water management servicing as a local cost that is directly provided by the developers, not part of the DC regime. So that’s an important consideration that could be made when you’re considering how you want to allocate costs as well as your local service and policy. Okay, and what would it take to bring something like that to us as an option if this were to not be passed today as is?

Through you, Mr. Chair. That’s a bit outside the recommendation that’s before you, but perhaps there could be a recommendation to staff for consideration of storm water management servicing for the local policy discussions that we’re going to be having or something of that nature that I’m sure clicks will be happy to craft up better than I can. Okay, thank you very much.

And I also do appreciate some of the comments that were made earlier on in terms of just equity. Sometimes people are trying to do something very small and yet large fees are being levied on them. And it doesn’t seem to make sense, but then we’ve got this bigger picture that we have to deal with as well. So it’s a challenge.

This is a complicated, complicated thing to do. But those are my comments for now. Further questions or comments? Okay, I just have a quick question for Mr.

Yeoman, given the discussion that occurred. It would seem to me that there’s a couple of options before council, we have moved in seconded motion. We could vote that down and send it basically craft an alternative recommendation. I believe we could also refer this back as an option with some information to bring back basically some alternatives along the lines that was discussed.

I’ve heard councilor Homer be very specific in some components that might work. Councilor Turner has been a little broader. So I wonder, is there a preferred method that staff has for you doing that work? Should that be council’s desire?

Because I think there’s a couple of ways to approach this and I’m curious on if you have a recommendation that would work given the dialogue that you’ve heard today. Through you Mr. Chair. So the alternative that probably would be most actionable would be a referral for consideration for the consideration of one of the options that council believes is more appropriate.

I would then allow us to go back and do further analysis. I would caution though that we do still feel quite strongly about the recommendation that is before you in relation to its defensibility going forward. So I would have to consider to make sure that it is something that is defensible that could be brought forward to go forward to take for the consideration. Okay, so there’s a move to seconded motion on the floor.

I’ll see if colleagues have any further. Councilor? I’ll move referral as indicated here. I think a referral for considerations of alternatives that might be more specific and have ability to going down the route at all was wording.

I’ll try to figure out the best wording to accomplish what Mr. Young would indicate there. At the gist of it, move referral back to staff for consideration of alternatives. Okay, well, we can work on wording its committee.

So it’s no problem for us to make sure that we get the wording that colleagues need. Obviously colleagues need to see wording before they can render their support. So be to look to the clerks to see if they can craft something. Maybe you could provide a little more context.

Councilor Turner on that so that they can draft something up. I’m trying to think of how best to say it. I mean, my preference is good option three, but it doesn’t sound like that might be as implementable. So there might be a hybrid in there.

And I think Councilor Almer had identified a couple key pieces and so if Mr. Yeoman. So I think those would be well considered as part of that motion in the front. Talk about it to be specific things about to storm water management and whether there’s opportunities to do public allocation versus growth allocation in the same way that we do with other infrastructure.

Just being silent ‘cause the clerk is quickly typing. I’ll go to Councilor Helmer. Well, some of that language is being worked on. Thank you.

I have a couple of questions I think through you to perhaps Mr. Yeoman and I appreciate the desire to need to look at some different approaches. I don’t really agree with what’s being recommended. I do wanna make sure though that if we’re gonna refer to something that there’s like a likelihood that we’re gonna get to a different outcome ‘cause what I don’t wanna do is sort of waste time looking at the same thing and end up in the same place and really not really advancing.

So I guess to be a bit more specific. And I don’t think we need to accomplish everything in every round of the DC bylaws and the updates. And when we review these issues, last time we didn’t make any changes and we are looking at it again when we’re thinking about not making any changes again. So I guess the storm water management is where I think I would support making some changes.

The sort of delta between what I would consider to be very obviously community growth, which like all these projects, as we know from looking at the charts, they all have the non-growth growth splits already in them. And then it’s a bit more specific about which geographic area is benefiting is the part that’s sort of up for discussion when we’re getting into should they be in this area or that area and which area is benefiting, right? And that’s the part that’s not really in our DC bylaw right now. So that one, the delta between that and the built area is about $46 million.

So it was $180 million on the one, but the growth portion of that is only $78 million. And then the built area one is in the 30s. So the delta something like 40 something million. So that’s not going to make an enormous impact on the rate if we’re to shift that around and have area rating on just those areas, those services, I should say.

If it was a change of that magnitude, do you think that’s meeting the principle of material enough? This is where I think if it’s a 3% shift, is that really going to be disputed? Is it worth fighting over? I want to ask about that because I think part of the concern is if it was appealed, defending it.

And that’s not $1.2 billion DC list of projects. That’s not really that much. And if that’s what we’re talking about shifting, then I think I just want to get a sense of if staff are interested in having that conversation or not. And I guess my last sort of related question is with the low impact development line, which is not insignificant.

That one is not so obvious to me about how it’s going to be apportioned, ‘cause it’s got a lot of different projects. And I think so. Do you think that one is one that would be up for discussion as well or we just leave it the way it is? Shiyama.

Three year worships are starting to chair. I should note that for everyone’s benefit. So when we were considering the various options that are before you, staff did reach deep to try to come up with a solution that would meet our other policy goals that we have that we’re all trying to advance as civic administration and council collectively. So that’s what this has been framed.

And there’s the ability, of course, to look at other options that just carry greater risks associated with them. And you start drifting more away from matching various costs with the growth that’s occurring. And you get away from some of the issues related to the network services that we mentioned as well. So if we were to come back with further review and analysis, we would definitely be articulating those various risks for council’s consideration.

So you have a full informed picture of the future of what you might be facing from what the stakeholders that would be engaged through the process and shouldn’t appeal to be made what the impacts would be. So, Turner, you wanted to move the referral. You’ve been emailed some language that you could review. Can I peek at it now?

Thank you. Councilor Hopkins, well, that’s being reviewed. Yeah, thank you. Mr.

Chair, since we’ve got a bit of time here is we’re reviewing the referral. I do have a question for you to staff. And Mr. Yeoman, I know we’re looking at a referral back, but if option three was supported with staff have a better opportunity of moving this forward.

Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Councilor, I think I might need you to clarify what you need then with this forward.

So we have a number of options in the recommendation. If we’re looking at a referral, I’m listening quite closely to what we’re asking staff to do and the work that needs to be done. And if we went with option three, would it be an easier or not so much easier, but would it benefit staff in implementing option three just moving this forward, given the timelines and risk challenges that you spoke about? Thank you, Mr.

Chair. I think the best way that I could answer that is that any decision point from Council tonight, obviously would help us advance this going forward and really help us continue to proceed with the DC study. So either the recommendations before that’s before you or the referral will help us advance the path that we’re going on to continue to flush things out. Okay, thank you for that.

Chair for allowing us some time to come up with a solid motion here. Just sent some wording back. Perhaps we can consider that might be something to consider. Yes, I see copied this back.

Perhaps you could read out your language so others could hear it and also that way, Mr. Yeoman who was not copied on the email could hear it as well. I think there’s some general understanding about what your intent is, but we want to get that in language that is worded to achieve that intent. So if you could read it out that way, Mr.

Yeoman can hear it too. And we can make sure that it has the effect that you’re intending. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This is a stab at it. I’m sorry this is complicated. The whole concept of development charges is complicated. So getting worded for referral back to be very precise is just as challenging.

And I wish I could be a little bit articulate. My attempt at this is that the matter of development charge area rating policy review be referred back to the civic administration for further consideration and research of options that would better recognize true cost discrepancies between new infrastructure costs inside and outside the built area, including but not limited to star water management. I’m not sure if that’s too vague or if it helps us narrow in a little bit. And I’d be very thankful to anybody who might provide some suggestions on how to better word that.

Well, I’m always a big fan of we can pass whatever we want. How staff operationalizes it is probably the most important thing. So maybe we can go to Mr. Yeoman.

Given the language, which is the clerk has sent to you so you can read it, I would stop going to handle that so that we understand what you will do. And then we can decide whether or not it’s something we want to support. Sure, through you, Mr. Chair.

I think that’s done a very good job of catching the intent of the refers and allows us to square the circle in terms of trying to provide some flexibility to explore options, but also provide us with some direction on where the referrals would like staff to focus their attention. So I believe that can be operationalized. Okay, Councilor Turner. Thank you, that’s helpful, Mr.

Yeoman. My intent is certainly not to box you in, but provide some opportunities for a little bit of a deeper dive into some options that might be palatable and workable. And I fully understand that you would come back with the risks associated with that and would expect that to, I think that’s important for Council to understand what they’re considering and what the risks associated with those might be so that we don’t put ourselves in a position that we might not want to. So, but this would be very helpful.

Thank you for consideration. Okay, so moved by Councilor Turner with that language. It’s in Eastcribe, is there a seconder for that? Councilor Hamil.

Okay, discussion on the referral and I’ll point colleagues to, in Eastcribe, if you refresh, you’ll be able to see the wording that Councilor Turner just read out. And so you can review that yourselves. Comments, questions? Councilor Elmer.

Thank you, and I’m still gonna make my mind up on whether a referral is actually a good idea or not. So by the fact that I don’t really like the recommendation, I’m not sure if a referral is a good idea. So I just have one, I guess last question for Mr. yeoman or perhaps for the consultants who worked on it, I just actually pulled up the DC study.

In the meantime, just didn’t refresh my memory about a couple of things. And a lot of the stormwater projects are kind of early on, I would say in the timeline that we’re talking about. And so a lot of these things will be probably built and charged out by 2025, ones that are in the DC by-law now. So my question is about the sort of line for built area works and whether it’s on the same kind of progressive timeline or if it’s less temporarily specific because we could be talking about a very, very small differences if we get around to updating in 2025 and a whole bunch of these things have been built under the by-law as it is now and charged with the rates that are in place.

No, Mr. yeoman. Mr. yeoman, Mr.

Chair, so the councilor is correct that the stormwater management program is very front-end loaded to provide many opportunities as we can throughout the city. A lot of those projects though will end up being debt financed given the state of the reserve fund right now. So we will have to look at how we would treat debt in another scenario where we’re looking at area rating when we’re proportionally allocating costs out and Mr. Binning and or Ms.

Strack, you might be able to speak to how that would be done in other municipalities. In terms of the built area works program, I will note that it is set up as a program so it doesn’t have necessarily discrete projects associated with it right now. We use proxy projects to inform that. And that’s something we’re working to flesh out with this study as we get more experience as we move forward.

What we are seeing is that a lot of the low-hanging fruit of service and capacity is getting eaten up pretty quick by the development that’s occurring and we’re actually gonna have to start occurring pretty significant costs related to the built area works program over the coming years as we go forward. So it will be a lot more aggressive than the years to come. Okay, so I think I’ll support the referral here at committee ‘cause I think it’s worth having a further discussion about it. It sounds like something that can be turned around relatively quickly because a lot of the work and looking at these options has already been done and it’s really can we take another second look at stormwater specifically and maybe we have a different idea.

And if we don’t, you know, so be it and we’ll have the discussion again at committee. I’m gonna think about it between now and council. However, one thing I’m concerned about colleagues is that we implement area rating right at the time when the costs of development might be shifting. So you imagine you have more intensification, you don’t have to have more upsizing of existing sewers, start seeing a whole bunch of costs for intensification in the interior built area part of the city and less on the outside ‘cause we’re starting to shift where development’s happening.

And then we have a long period where things were tilted one way. We can’t go back in time and fix that, right? We’re only talking about what’s happening in the future. And if in the future, we finally get a fair, more fair approach to development costs and it actually penalizes intensification.

You know, that could be very problematic and be kind of shooting ourself in the foot in terms of our intensification goals. So that’s something I think I’m gonna think through what the long-term impacts of this would be ‘cause we’re really talking about what’s gonna happen between 2025 and 2030, right? Not what’s happening next year or the year after 2025 to 2030. So yeah, I’m not totally sure that the referral is gonna get us to a better place.

I’m also not convinced by the recommendations. I’m not sure that really leaves me, but okay. I’ll support the recommendation for now. Councilor Cassidy.

Thank you, Mr. Presiding Officer. I have a question through you to Mr. Yeoman.

And this is coming from a question that Councillor Hopkins asked about Slim Pawns. And you made a comment about DC charges funding those things or going and having the developers build them. So is that still on the table under this referral? Or was that just, I mean, response to a question that Councillor Hopkins made?

Or is that something that you will be considering as part of this referral? Mr. Yeoman. Thank you, Mr.

Chair. So that’s not under consideration with the referral and it’s not under consideration with the staff recommendation that was brought forward. I will state that our preliminary considerations and discussions related to stormwater management haven’t considered a moving stormwater management to a local service that would have a number of implications that would have to be sorted out, but that would have to be separate direction that be provided related to that. Thank you for that, because it is my understanding that many, many years ago, it was a different way.

And City took building of those ponds on in order to ensure standards were met, city standards were met and ponds were built in a certain way if I’m correct on that. Yes, okay, so I would not want to see a regression there. So thank you for that response. And thanks to my colleagues for this discussion.

It is a complex subject. I always do appreciate Councillor Turner and Councillor Helmer who are very neck deep in this kind of stuff and are very helpful in moving the discussion along for the rest of us on Council, but it is a very important and it’s important that we get this right as well. So I’m happy to support the referral. Great, any other comments?

Okay, we have a moved and seconded referral. Wait, we need a seconder still? I think I got one. Okay, we got one.

I just haven’t refreshed my screen, my apologies. So moved by Councillor Turner, seconded by Councillor Hamou. We will open that for voting ‘cause there are no more speakers. Closing the vote, the motion’s passed, 10 to four.

Okay, thank you, colleagues. And as was said, a complicated subject, lots of details and implications to it. I know that Mr. Yeoman and his team, staff team, if you have questions between now and Councillor, certainly would be available to provide any clarifications that colleagues might need on.

On this particular topic, I know Mr. Yeoman’s always happy to talk about things like development charges, area ratings, all those, that sort of stuff. He’s a very, he’s got a very smart mind on this and a very smart team supporting him. On to the next item, which is confirmation of appointments to the old East BIA.

Is there a recommendation from colleagues on this? Councillor Halmer, willing to go ahead. I’ll move the recommendation that’s in the communication, essentially to accept the resignation of three members of the board and to appoint two people to fill two of those three vacancies. If there’s a seconder, then I just wanna speak to it briefly.

Sure, I see a seconder in Councillor Five Miller. I’ll go to you for speaking. I just wanted to say the three folks who are leaving the board, just wonderful people have really given their all to the BIA over the years. Jamie, running Love Alchemy through the pandemic, especially has been extremely difficult for him and his staff and I wanna really commend them for the work that they did trying to push things along for all the businesses in the area, not just their own, they’re really great people and it’s been a pleasure working with Jamie over the years.

Ellie at the Root Cellar, absolutely wonderful small business owner in the area, resident in the area too. It’s really sorry to see her go. I mean, her husband, Jeff, also served on the board and then Ellie and the Root Cellar leadership has just been tremendous on the BIA. And then Heather from the Western Fair.

Heather is one of the board members who’s been on the board longer than I have quite a bit longer actually. She’s been on there for a really long time and the partnership between the Western Fair and the old East Village BIA has been really, really good over the years and it’s partly because of the work of Heather driving it forward. She’s part of the institutional knowledge in the organization and she’s just on a really wonderful job in a very understated and humble way. You’d almost wouldn’t notice she’s never taking credit for any of the stuff she’s making happen in the background.

She’s just a tremendous person. And it’s great to have somebody coming back from the palace. We used to have a person from the palace on the board and it’s been a few years without that. And I think especially as we’re going through recovery, that’ll be essential.

And it’s great to see somebody new from the Western Fair stepping up to take over for Heather, a bit of a generational change happening there. And I think I’m really looking forward to working with Michelle. Great, so that’s moved and seconded. Any further comments?

Seeing none, we’ll open that for voting. Using the vote, the motion’s passed 14 to zero. And next we have a correspondence from Councilor Van Holst about including carbon offsets as a strategy. I’ll go to Councilor Van Holst to introduce your letter and any possible motion you’d like to make out of this.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And while looking through the climate emergency action plan, I was considering some of the things that I could do from my home, I wanna look at the idea of a heat pump. And there’s a project that would reduce the natural gas used for heating by 30%, but really a 27 year payback on that one.

So not the most cost effective, especially when actually what I need to do next is replace the roof or the. So I actually took a look and saw what would happen if I tried to meet goals through offsets and if you look here, I basically took the different percentages that are targets and said, what would it cost to meet those targets? And then also to go 10 years with at net zero from 2050 through 2059 and turns out to be fairly cost effective and which makes sense because certainly there’s gonna be projects that lots of people contribute to them. They’re gonna be more cost effective than the kinds of things that we can do on our own, you recall earlier today, Councillor Turner was saying that a lot of this is piled on the individual.

Well, offsets are more a collective approach to do that. And it turned out to be quite cost effective. And I think it’s valuable for a number of people. One, the groups that may have a lot of costs to bring their household emissions down.

And two, it also provides some opportunities for those who are in a situation where they can’t really do their fair share, for instance, or they would like to do more. And so you can see for someone who would only be able to get a 10% reduction based on the suggestions that we’ve made here, they could meet all the targets including net zero through 2059 for $1,081. And if you said, hey, I’m gonna take this on now and started saving month to month to cover the cost of all those offsets, it’d be $2.43. You’d have to put in the bank every month into an account to do that.

And that struck me as something pretty exciting. So I figured out what it would be for the other scenarios that were provided. And in each case, it was pretty encouraging in terms of the numbers. And so what I think would be worthwhile is in the community action plan include these kinds of numbers.

So people realize there’s another option that can either get them further or do the same thing because however you reach net zero, it still has the same effect on the environment. Some are just more cost-effective than the others. But there’s, I think it’ll give people a little more hope in this way. So the motion, although I’ll make a couple more comments was simply that staff be directed to include carbon offsets as an option for households in the climate emergency action plan.

And I think it’ll, we may get a little broader acceptance of the plan as well, ‘cause there’s some things, I think in it that are a challenge or I see now, for instance, electric vehicles, just getting a vehicle now is very difficult. And because those vehicles require more microchips than a regular vehicle, we may not see between now and 2030 a situation where we can meet those goals. Whereas here we’ll be able to do it. And maybe the last thing I’d like to put in there is what would really excite me is if people are amenable to offsets is that somehow we at the city also provide projects where we can collect funds and do those here in the city.

So that’s a different issue, but for this, it was just the matter of including figures like these in our climate emergency action plan for the various households. And when I spoke with Councillor Hillier about this, he was said he was willing to second that motion. So I’ll put that on the floor and those are my comments. Thank you.

So Councillor, so I know you have a mover and a seconder. One of the things came up by remeaning about this agenda was just some clarification on the motion. So we can get it up. The climate emergency action plan is in its draft form for consultation, your motion as it’s read and your communication is to just put this in the climate emergency action plan.

So is your intent here to add this into the draft plan so that it can be consulted on? Or are you just, you’re asking us to just do this in advance of us having completed the consultations on the draft? So I just wanna make sure we get the motion on the floor that you intend to make given the stage we are in the process for this document. Okay, my apologies.

Yes, it was to, I guess I did intend this to be in the draft plan. So that could come back and people could look at it and then that would be part of the discussions as well. Okay, so the clerk could make some adjustment to the wording to recognize that this is for consideration in the draft plan that’s out for public consultation. Ms.

Sher, go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Mayor and I apologize for interrupting your instruction to the clerk. I just wanted to note that this actually is already in the draft plan under area focus seven, demonstrating leadership in municipal processes and collaborations.

Action item 11, parts A, B, and C speak to a peer review to develop an offset strategy, a revaluation of offset models and quality and the establishment of an offset policy. So if that’s helpful, Councillor Venvall’s motion is aligned with the plan and highlights how this could be potentially used and there may not be a need for any amendments to the draft plan. Councillor, you got that information now, I’ll go back to you. Okay, thank you very much.

And indeed that was kind of inspired my looking into this because I knew and did mention it at the last meeting that we were gonna, that that was a possibility. However, since we are including in the return draft plan for community consultation, the kinds of numbers and costs for the various purchases that people would make. What I hope was to also see these kinds of numbers that can be used just like this or staff can do their own calculations. But to see numbers that go in there as well, because when people come and speak to us about it, I’d like to have them be able to look at something that’s concrete and say, “Hey, this is what these costs would be.

“Here’s what offset costs would be.” And now I understand what the plan is. I don’t want it to be something vague. So my motion would be in fact to include these numbers or calculations that your staff make themselves. Mr.

Cassidy. Mr. Chair, before we make any changes to staff’s report or draft report that they’re gonna be presenting to the community, I would prefer to hear from staff on this approach. We certainly can, I’ll go to Mr.

Chair. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Mayor. And hopefully my dog is being distracted by some more high quality committee treats.

At this point, we would be reluctant to include examples or numbers only because there’s a number of models available online worldwide. Many of them are not verified right now and their ability to do localized offset or even to confirm that those offset investments are made is something that municipalities and other levels of government are looking into with a lot of rigor. So what we’re proposing is that we’re going to do all of that work, including a peer review of other Canadian municipalities, a review of those offset measures and how they’re implemented, monitored, tracked and verified. And ultimately bring you back a quantitative policy with options that residents can select from that meet their own offset needs.

I think Councillor Van Halst has done some very good work in researching what’s out there and we appreciate all those links and we’ll certainly be reviewing all of them. But I’m hesitant to recommend any of the numbers that are available right now through some of the commercial offset programs, only because we haven’t had a chance, most governments in Canada have not had a chance to do a robust peer review to make sure that those offsets are actually being implemented. But that is certainly the path we want to get to. Councillor Cassidy.

Thank you. Through you, thank you to Ms. Chair. Okay, Councillor Van Halst, I have an updated motion for you and E-Scribe.

You also have that additional information that our staff have given you. So happy to proceed with the motion if you’d like. It’s your right to make it, but you also now know exactly how they’re going to approach these numbers. So I’ll put the ball back in your court on this one.

Okay, thank you very much. Well, I think these can be presented with some context is that these are what rates are. And these were suggested as Canadian standards, certified offsets. So coming from one place, I think we can somehow create a caveat emptor where residents can see that this, these are the ballpark figures.

And that would be fine with me too. I didn’t spend a lot of time shopping for the best ones. I just simply look for ones that seemed like they were the most, seemed like they were quite reliable and more Canadian. So I’m fine putting this in.

I think it would be helpful because we’re going to have a public participation meeting. And this is the kind of talk that discussion people might have. So I’ll leave the motion on the floor and we can move forward. Well, I’d like you to read the motion in eScribe to make sure you’re comfortable with it because the clerk has drafted it and it should be the language is different than what you put in your letter.

So let me know if that’s the motion you’d like to move. And if that’s the case, I’ll ask for a seconder and then we’ll proceed. Okay, thank you very much. All right, let me find the item.

So it says that civic administration be directed to include additional detailed calculations/information related to carbon offsets as an option for households in the climate emergency action plan in order for inclusion in the public consultation of the plan. And perhaps we need to insert the word draft in there before climate emergency action plan. Yeah, we’ll make that change. Okay, but I think that would give us a more robust discussion at the meeting.

And I’ll say we’re gonna be looking for prices of EVs in there, but no one’s gonna hold us to the cost of a general figure that we put in here or we’re giving people ideas of what the costs might be. So we can create a better understanding of what’s possible and give us a better discussion. Okay, thank you. Is there someone willing to second this motion?

Okay, Councilor Hillier is willing to second it. A discussion on the motion on the floor. Councilor Turner. Thanks, Mr.

Chair. Thanks to Councilor Van Holst for spending the time to look into this and looking for alternatives. I certainly appreciate where he’s coming from. I think given the responses that we’ve heard, I see this rather redundant and perhaps leads to a bit of confusion as well.

And I think staff will work to help present the options as best possible. I think what we heard to provide some assurance of that. And in general, I understand where the idea for offsets might come from. My concerns with offsets is that it doesn’t lead to behavior change.

Instead, it just leads to throwing money at the problem which in the 13th century, the Catholic Church decided to pursue indulgences where you could pay money for your sins and still go to heaven. And I see offsets as much like that. So philosophically, I’m not very supportive of the idea. I understand that people need to be doing something.

It does help somebody else some other place, some other time to be able to do some sort of carbon reduction activities. But I don’t really see a straight line between somebody paying extra money and those activities being done. I think it’s really important that we recognize the personal illness and responsibility that we have in reductions. Councillor Cassidy.

Thank you, I’m Mr. Presiding Officer. I’m not gonna support the motion that’s on the floor. We just heard from staff that they’re going to be doing some robust research into this matter.

And my worry is that we put incorrect, possibly incorrect information in a draft report for the general public to see. And then if it proves to be inaccurate, staff then have to undo that and have to try to re-educate people on what the actual numbers really are. I say staff have made the commitment to do the work, to do the research, to get the accurate numbers and information that will be available to the public. We let staff do their job and we should not be putting possibly inaccurate information in the draft report.

I will not support this recommendation or this motion that’s on the floor. Any other speakers? Councillor Helmer. I just wanted to ask about the practical side about changing the draft report partway through the consultation.

So this recommendation from committee will go to council on the 22nd of March. When are we expecting to have a report back on the draft report? Can someone remind me of that ‘cause I wanna make sure that it squares up with the timeline we’re talking about changing the report which couldn’t happen until after the 22nd of March? Ms.

Chair. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Mayor. I agree that changing the draft report that’s up for consultation creates confusion because you would have a people commented on the report to date.

And then a new change at this point that people who are commenting from here on would have in their hands. We’re intending to report back next month to have that conversation in PPMs. So certainly if there’s direction to accelerate this type of work, we could do that after the consideration of the draft plan. But as I said, this work is included in the plan as it currently stands.

And we would expect to report back with those details and recommendations about what offsets can and can’t do and how we should pursue them in the city. Thank you. Thank you for the comments. Councillor Vanholst, go ahead.

Thank you. I just wanted to respond to Councillor Turner’s comment I would point out that our goal is to limit the amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere. The goal is not necessarily to change everybody’s behavior. So there really isn’t necessarily a moral imperative here to do one or the other.

If there’s a cost-effective ways to sequester carbon, then that’s the kind of direction that we should go in. Rather than, again, put expensive burdens on people if they’re not necessarily. So we can need to keep our minds open to those kinds of things and not make this too much like we are working our way to heaven instead of buying our way to heaven, the goal is we’re trying to deal with the concentrations of trace gases in the atmosphere so that we can control the effects of those. But I prefer to see these numbers if people are happy to move ahead and present the plan to the citizens as it is now, including the costs which our staff did already commit to make that change.

So there is one change that’s being made already. It’s up to council, but I would like to see these kinds of things. So I’ll support it. All right, thank you.

I don’t have any other speakers. So I’m going to open this for voting. Closing the vote, the motion’s lost, three to 11. Okay, thank you.

We have one more item under items for direction. Oh, but we need a motion to receive the communication from council rent homes moved by councilor Hopkins, seconded by councilor Fife Miller, any comments? Okay, seeing none, we will open that for voting to receive the communication. Closing the vote, the motion’s passed 14 to zero.

Okay colleagues, the next item is the third report of the diversity inclusion and anti-oppression advisory committee, a look for the mover of that report. Councilor Hopkins, seconder, councilor Cassidy, any discussion or questions on the report? Councilor Turner. I think there’s just a motion in there that there’s a referral for the continuity of the existing committee as a referral to the governance committee.

So I just wanted to point that out. I think that’s an important recommendation for us to consider, and I support it. Yes, that’s under 5.3 in the report colleagues, if you want to review that. Any further comments?

The motion is in e-scribe. You can see that there with no further comments. I’ll open this for voting. Closing the vote, the motion’s passed 13 to zero.

Okay colleagues, it is 6.30. We’ve been at this for a while. We have one item under added business, deferred matters, additional business, and we have a couple of important in-camera items. So at this point, I think it would be appropriate if colleagues are interested in taking a, perhaps a 15 to 20 minute break, it was 20 minutes.

Someone’s willing to move that. Councilor Fife Miller, seconded by anybody? Councilor Lewis, in discussion on taking a break, we’re going to open that for voting in the system. Closing the vote, the motion’s passed 12 to one.

Okay, we’ll be back here in 20 minutes. colleagues, I’m going to ask you to turn your cameras on so we can check quorum. I have two colleagues who have informed me that they won’t be returning to the meeting. Councilor McMillan, Councilor Sele both have other engagements that they’ve moved on to.

Okay, that means I have quorum. So we will return to the agenda. We’re on item five, deferred matters, additional business. 5.1 is an added item on your added agenda.

Palace Theater, Arts Commons, loan forgiveness, a business case at a correspondence from Councilor’s, Elmer and Fife Miller. I’ll go to which one of you would like to start? Like Councilor Halmer’s still looking to join us. So I’ll go to you Councilor first.

Thank you, Chair. And through you, I think that there was a thought process in my discussions with Councilor Halmer about bringing this back to Council for some more input. It’s been two years of challenges at the Palace Theater. And I think there’s one thing that we fully understand that Palace and London community players really represents community theater in the city of London and the importance of community theater in the city.

I think that when we look back at the loan that was given out for the work that was done internally within the theater, that loan I think we can see what it would mean to the theater as a whole for us to pick up that cost. And I think really what it speaks further to for a council is really what do the arts mean to us overall? We talk a lot about the arts and we talk a lot about its importance to the city. But I think as we come out of COVID, we need to respect the fact that locations such as the Palace Theater have a great deal of importance, not just to theater, but to the community as a whole.

And I think when you look at the oldies village, I think that the Palace Theater is one of those anchors that will see the revitalization of the oldies village continue, especially post COVID. And I think it’s very necessary. I think it’s an important piece to the community there. And I think for these reasons, I think you can see from the information that’s come in from the supporters.

I think the support is there from the community as a whole to see this organization succeed. I think this is one step that we can make towards that success. So I’m happy to support this. So thank you.

Okay, and are you moving the motion that is contained within your letter? I am moving that, yes. And I think I believe Councillor Hummer will be seconding that further speakers. Councillor Hummer.

Thank you. And sorry for joining late. We had the Zoom meeting switcharoo during the break and putting our kid to bed. So the wall time break, but I’m a little late joining.

So I don’t know, I heard the tail end of what Councillor Fyff Miller said. And I’m certainly convinced by that. So hopefully everyone is. I do want to say there’s two items in the communication from Councillor Fyff Miller myself.

One is about the deferral of the broad range of CIP incentive loans and allowing people to defer repayments on those. And I truly wish that that wasn’t necessary at this point back in September when we were talking about this issue. Most recently, I think we all hope that the pandemic impact would have dissipated and we’d be a bit more back to normal by this point. But here we are just before the repayments are set to resume.

And I do think another referral is necessary. So I hope there’ll be support for that in consultation with the City Treasurer. It’s very clear that the Reserve Fund that is responsible for these programs can’t sustain indefinite deferrals and continued deferrals forever. And I do think by the end of the year that’s the last time we’re going to be able to defer and hopefully we’ll be able to see repayments happening by the end of the year.

And I just want to acknowledge that because I know we’ve dealt with this matter several times over the course of the pandemic. And eventually it’s going to stop. And I think this is the last deferral if it goes through. On the issue of the palace, I appreciate the discussion we had last fall.

Again, I think everyone was hoping that the arts and culture scene would be a bit more back to normal by this point, but it’s not. And people are still really hurting. And I know that many people wanted a bit more information about what’s going on, what are the cost of benefits, what’s exactly the status of the various loans that are out there and specifically this one from the palace. And the only thing I really want to draw your attention to specifically is the practical difficulties of having this loan and doing something that would be relatively straightforward.

Like we need to renegotiate our terms of our mortgage and we want to talk to our bank about something that affects our organization. And just having the city involved as a lender really complicates things, not just for the palace, but also for the city. And it’s a lot of work to be involved in this sort of thing. And it’s one of the things I regret about this sort of initial decision to do a loan interest fee loan instead of a grant.

So I hope that we can forgive the remainder part of this loan. I think that the grant will obviously help. It’ll also simplify things administratively for both the city and for the palace. At a time when I think people would rather be focusing on the urgent things that are in front of them and not a whole bunch of paperwork with the banks.

So, yeah, I hope colleagues having looked at the material wouldn’t be supportive of the forgiveness. It certainly will help the palace cedar arts commons at a really critical point in their recovery. Further speakers, Councillor Lewis. Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

And through you, I was opposed to this, the last time it came before us. But the situation has changed. First of all, I have a lot more information in front of me now. But the palace itself has also provided and taken its own steps to show that it’s taken some fiscal steps around staffing, reductions and things like that to address the fact that the pandemic had an impact on them.

They’re also starting to put together and show some, I guess I’m gonna call it reopening plans in terms of how they’re going to reactivate things again. So it’s a bit different situation for me than it was last time. I’m not hearing the concerns from the community that I heard last time. So I’m generally more supportive of it.

I will say that I am still concerned at the end of the day that the situation could change for them in a couple of months and we could honestly be paying for building improvements to a property that goes up for sale and ends up in private hands. That’s still a concern. But I do recognize that by having the building in the better state, it’s also less likely that we would see somebody come in, purchase the building and then seek a demolition permit. And heritage value of that building certainly is in place that would make that difficult, but we’ve seen demolition permits come in for heritage properties before.

So I think the investment that’s been made makes it much more likely that even if the property were to change hands, we wouldn’t see somebody coming in to tear it down, which is a good thing. I guess the one thing that I will finish with is certainly I’m willing to support the forgiveness this time. And it does have a benefit to the city as well as Councillor Helmer pointed out in terms of taking administrative work off of the plate of staff. And we’ve certainly given them more than enough administrative work in the last year around other COVID measures that taking some off would be a good thing.

But at some point, and I do hope that the folks at the palace take this in their spirit that it’s meant, I can forgive this loan today, but this was on top of some other repairs that had been necessitated, that’s awesome investment. I can’t continue to invest public dollars into this building. So there does need to be a plan for long-term sustainability by the organization itself, but I’m willing to support it today because the information I have is much better than it was. And the circumstances around it have changed.

So I will support this tonight and wish them the best going forward. Councillor Vanholst. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I’ll also support this motion. And I do appreciate the choice of source of funding as well. So I wish the palace theater all the best and it’ll be great to get into a beautiful heritage building. And see some wonderful community theater taking place.

Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to speak to this. I’m going to hand the chair to Councillor Layman.

Thank you. I’ll look to the Deputy Mayor. Thank you, colleagues. So I will support this motion as well in both parts.

The first part, I want to thank the colleagues who wrote the letter to recognize that, to do their due diligence on this, to know that it’s important for us to have the capacity to provide relief where we can through deferral of payments, but also recognize that, you know, that puts strain on our own reserve funds and that at some point we will have to return to our capacity to, you know, to fund these initiatives. And so I think it’s a responsible next step in this. Hopefully the length of period puts us in a situation where things have returned to normal and these sorts of initiatives won’t be necessary for us. But I’m fully supportive of that.

On the second piece, I also want to echo my thanks for the additional information on this particular item. I also appreciate the colleagues have identified a source of financing. I will note, I would have also been comfortable with the Community Investment Reserve Fund for this type of purpose. So if someone does have a concern about the source of financing, like there are some other options here, I certainly wouldn’t want to see you not supported because of that.

But I think both are reasonable options. I’m comfortable with the sources, it stands there. And I think as has been said, it’s a decision that we made years ago, it’s a unique arrangement that is not replicated for any other organization and it’s likely administratively positive to put this particular loan behind us, particularly given the impacts that COVID has had on organizations in our city and including this one. So I’m comfortable supporting both these items.

And I will say, I know there were questions about being outside the budget. In the past, I personally am a little more comfortable with it because the source of financing options are those that have been already been budgeted and allocated. So it’s a good draw on funds that have already been vetted by council for these sorts of purposes. Thank you.

I’ll return the chair to the deputy mayor noting that there are no other people on the speakers list. Oh, I see a councilor Palosa. Councilor Randholst also has hand up, I think it might have been, he just didn’t take it down. Okay, councilor Palosa.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I had raised similar concerns over this request as it came through concerned about financing, reconvening one off. I know other colleagues had concerns about, if we do it for one, will there be more coming in realizing those concerns?

And you believe that would be inappropriate? Councilor Palosa, let me just interrupt you. You’re breaking up in your discussion. We’re missing what you’re saying.

We want to hear it. Perhaps we could try turning your camera off and seeing if we get a stable audio. Or if you want to try again, we just don’t want to miss what you’re saying. And it’s very choppy at the moment.

Perhaps it’ll be better. I changed to a different internet channel at City Hall. Mr. Chair, is this adequate this time?

Perfect. And thank you for your kindness of actually wanting to hear what politicians have to say. At least we appreciate amongst each other. So raising the concern in the past that the funding financing, recognizing it is all taxpayer money and our responsibility with it.

Glad that Love and Community Recovery Network money was identified, realizing the huge benefit that arts and culture plays in our community and how many people in the community are looking forward to enjoying those things as we return to our multiple theaters and venues as things reopen. Realizing that within this is the concern from former of colleagues formerly of if we do it for one, one other people might come realizing this is a unique opportunity that this not profit was given, that it is not going to be a flood of requests coming to us. And realizing that it is interfering with their mortgage applications, which would be financially detrimental to them and probably causing them to fold. And realizing the extreme staff time is taking behind the scenes of our staff to help them along the way and get people work in order and the people and the volunteers at their organization.

So this time I will be supportive of this and thank you to colleagues for bringing this one forward. Any further speakers? Okay, so the motion is in eScribe. It’s duly moved and seconded.

Councilor Van Merberg. Yeah, thank you Deputy Mayor. I’m just asking if you could call A and B separately on this motion? Yes, we can certainly do that.

We’ll have that split. So what we’ll do is we’ll do A first, which is the part on the extended deferral period for the community improvement plan loan repayments. These are interest-free loans for a further period of 274 days from the start of April, which puts them to the end of the year. So that will be on the floor first.

I assume the same mover and seconders are comfortable with that. I see a nod from one and the other. Yep, okay. So moved and seconded.

Any speakers on A? No, okay. We’re gonna open A for voting. Closing the vote, the motion’s passed, 12 to zero.

Okay, and I’ll look to the same mover and seconder for part B. I see nods, yep. So part B is the part specific to the house theater, the loan forgiveness piece. There’s no further discussion on that, which I’m seeing no colleagues.

We’ll open this piece for voting as well. Closing the vote, the motion’s passed, 11 to one. Okay, colleagues, that brings us to, first off I should ask, are there any other additional business items? Okay, seeing none.

That brings us to the confidential session in our agenda tonight. I’ll look for a motion to move into camera for the two items that are listed on the public agenda. Moved by Councillor Lehman, seconded by Councillor Cassidy. We’re gonna do that one by hand.

So just turn on your cameras, to put your hands up, all those in favor of moving into camera. That motion’s passed. Okay, give us a few minutes to get that set. Recording in progress.

Okay, colleagues, we’ve returned from our confidential session. I’m gonna have Councillor Lehman report out on that. I’ll report out that progress was made on the items listed in the committee agenda and their confidential session. Okay, given that, it brings us to the end of our agenda.

I will look for a motion to adjourn. Councillor Van Hal seconded by Councillor Hillier. All those in favor of German? The motion’s passed.

Okay, thank you everyone. Have a great night.