The Blue Mountains council has again decided to delay implementation of a new water and wastewater allocation policy for the town.
At its committee of the whole meeting on Nov. 19, council once again put off making a decision about the new allocation policy and instead pushed the issue to council’s next regular meeting scheduled for Dec. 2.
Four of the five members of council voted in favour of another delay for the adoption of the new policy. Coun. Paula Hope was the lone member to speak against continued deferral of the policy. Mayor Andrea Matrosovs and Deputy Peter Bordignon were not present for the discussion as they had left the proceedings for other meetings.
Hope said the proposed allocation policy is “one of the most important innovations” of this council term and she urged council to get on with the business of formally approving the policy to allow staff to bring the bylaw forward to officially implement the new rules.
“It’s so important to no longer have first come, first served when it comes to development applications. It means the town has control over it. It must be a fair and equitable way of evaluating all applications,” Hope said. “I think we’ve achieved that. We’ve worked on it for a long time.”
If approved, the proposed policy would create new guidelines for handing out water and wastewater service reservations to new development. An evaluation criteria would be used to rank projects and each proposed development would be judged by a committee of town staff. Committee decisions could be appealed directly to council.
The proposed policy has generated significant interest in the development community and council has received multiple delegations and letters on the matter over the months the policy has been in development. In late Sept., council delayed approval of the policy to give town staff time to address concerns raised by developer interests.
In his report, Adam Smith, the town’s director of planning and development services, said the policy had been revised to include front-ending agreements between the town and developers in the policy’s definitions of development agreements. A front-end agreement is when a developer agrees to pay to upgrade town services upfront ahead of their development going forward.
Smith recommended that council proceed with approval of the policy to allow the bylaw to come forward for approval on Dec. 2. The town intends to have the new policy come into effect at the start of 2025.
Smith acknowledged the “anxiety” in the development community about the proposed policy. At the meeting, Ken Hale, of Great Gulf and the Georgian Triangle Development Institute, spoke to council about the proposed allocation policy and requested revisions.
“I’d like to turn our attention to implementing it to work with the development community on addressing any of the challenges that may exist as opposed to questioning the legality of whether we can do this or not,” said Smith.
The majority of council preferred holding off on a decision and passed a motion to delay any approval of the policy until staff had time to review the comments made by Hale.
“We should really be careful and take our time when crafting a law. We’ve got to get it right,” said Coun. Shawn McKinlay.
