A group of Collingwood residents are pushing the town to go greener.
During council’s regular meeting on April 22, council heard a deputation from the Collingwood Climate Action Team’s (CCAT) director of programs Bryan Vermander, calling on Collingwood to consider joining Grey County in their Tri-County Green Development Standards project.
“The window for this opportunity for Collingwood is closing soon as public consultations have started,” Vermander explained.
The Tri-County Green Development Standards (GDS) project is a collaborative initiative between Grey, Dufferin, and Wellington counties to create consistent green development standards. Those standards are informed by best practices, existing building credential programs, and local input from municipalities, the industry and residents. The goal of the collaboration is to establish a consistent framework across the counties, making it easier for the development industry to meet and incorporate the standards into their projects.
Vermander said an offer has been extended by Grey County for Collingwood to join in on the program. He said CCAT has been in talks with town staff about joining up, which would include a pledge to implement the standards by the end of 2024.
Vermander noted that town staff capacity is limited, the project isn’t in the town’s current workplan, and there are cross-jurisdictional issues with Collingwood being firmly in the County of Simcoe.
“The town could be the expert for future Simcoe County efforts,” said Vermander.
“Implementing green development standards is more than the standards themselves – it’s about political will,” he said. “It’s time to stop building infrastructure for yesterday’s climate.”
Green development standards are a set of principles that guide development, and can include aspects in new builds such as energy efficiency measures, sustainable building materials, stormwater infiltration features, native and drought-resistant plants and sidewalks/crosswalks to make communities more walkable.
Currently in Collingwood, green development standards are encouraged for new developments through the servicing capacity allocation policy (SCAP), which is the town’s merit-based system that allocates points to a development applying for a building permit based on the inclusion of elements in their proposal. However, the town does not require green development standards be used.
“At this time, there are very few implementation tools that are available for municipalities, which is a challenge under the planning act,” said the town’s planning director Summer Valentine. “The (Ontario) Building Code is even more limited.”
Valentine said that to date, there hasn’t been much uptake from developers on the green elements of the SCAP.
“CCAT is embarking on some developer education, and they’ve kindly agreed that staff can sit in and use that information to promote it through our pre-consultation process,” she said.
At the end of council’s committee of the whole meeting, Mayor Yvonne Hamlin put forward a notice of motion to call on Ontario to include green development standards in their new building code, which is expected to come into effect Jan. 1, 2025. The motion will be considered at a future meeting.
For more information on the Tri-County Green Development Standards project, click here.
