Bayview school site debate shows bureaucratese undermining public consultation

Theresidents of Riverside Park have been blindsided twice this year by plans hatched behind closed doors.

First it was a "surprise" $2-million playground being installed at Mooney's Bay.

Now, directly across the road, the former Bayview school site may be redeveloped to include small-scale retail andcommercial uses. That's in direct contradiction to a council-approved 2009 concept plan.

• Riverside to lose field house, gain commercial strip in 'revised' Bayview school site plan

The top bidder wants to build what sounds like a two-storey strip mall along Riverside Drive, with commercial on thebottom and apartments on top an option no one had ever mentioned during the manymonths of public consultation for thesite.

Residents weren't happy, and about a half-dozen made the trek to Tuesday's finance and economic development committee to say so.

There needs to be a chance for thecommunitymembers to come out in an evening and voice their concerns about this change that was done verysneakily.- Ravi Singh, Riverside Park resident

"The concept plan was a disappointment. And I don't think they followed the community consultation that was done in 2009,"saidCraigSearle, vice-presidentof Riverside Park Recreation and CommunityAssociation.

Searle waspart of a visioning exercise back in 2009 when, as he said, "the community was against commercial and retail."

'Not something I've ever advocated for'

RaviSinghmoved to the neighbourhood in 2014 and lives next to the Bayview property. Unlike some of his neighbours, he's not automatically against commercial uses for the site. But he's alarmed that the public onlyfound outabout the changes to the original concept plan a week ago, meaningmany people couldn't come to Tuesday's daytime committee meeting.

"There needs to be a chance for thecommunitymembers to come out in an evening and voice their concerns about this change that was done verysneakily, in my opinion," Singhsaid.

Riley Brockington, the councillor for the area, saidhe's also against commercial uses at the site.

"It's not something I've ever advocated for,"Brockington told CBC News.

However, Brockington said he's known about the proposal for some commercial on the site for months, after signinga non-disclosure agreement that allowed him to see what the preferred buyer was planning for the landbut also forbade him from discussing it. (Brockington had also signed a non-disclosure agreement ahead of the Mooney's Bay playground project,into which the city is pouring $1 million.)

Pushing revised plan through on'gobbledegook'

There are a lot of technicalities being used to get around what were the clearly intended plans for the Bayview school site.

In 2014, the land was transferred tothe Ottawa Community Lands Development Corporation, a stand-alone corporation that sells the city's surplusland. When the transfer occurred, council agreed that "any change to the development concept plan [must] be reported back to the City of Ottawa" through its committees before the land was sold.

But because thatdirection didn't explicitly say that changes had to be brought back to councillors for approval, the finance committeeTuesday was simplytold about the changes, and it simply received the report. (Brockington could not find a committee member whowould move a motion to defer the issue to the new year.)

And the planning folks seem to be implying that because the community had agreed to medium-density residential development, they had automatically agreed to some commercial development too.

How so? According to the city's director of real estate, Gordon McNair: "If we look at the R5 residential zone, it doesallow for ancillary commercial uses."

That explanation prompted Searle to yell from the sidelines: "That's gobbledegook."

It's hard not to side with Searle. Here's what R5 zoning actually allows: it permits "ancillary uses to the principal residential use to allow residents to work at home and to accommodate convenience retail and service uses of limited size." Typically, R5 zoning refers to allowing forsmall shops on the ground floors of apartment buildings.

The fact is, no one from the city had ever used the words "commercial" or "retail"or "store" in the years leading up to Tuesday's report. If an intensified residential development had the potential to include commercial development, no matter how minor, why was that never mentioned?

Hiding behind technical bureaucrateseis not transparent. And it'snot what true consultation is about.