City council passed the new Riley Local Area Plan (LAP) on March 4, after turning down several amendments that would have mitigated the effects of the plan on our community.
Thank you, everybody who participated in our efforts to be heard. I’m sorry that we got nowhere in the end. Councillor Wong proposed several amendments to roll back to the May/October 2024 version as we asked, for us, for Hillhurst, and West Hillhurst… but the best vote was a 6-6 tie, which is still a failure. The only amendment that passed was dealing with a developer’s request to refer and re-examine a set of lots with Heritage status… So, the developer’s need passed, the citizens’ needs didn’t… need we say more…
As I understood it, when the final vote on the basically unchanged LAP came, and only Councillor Wong and Councillor Chabot voted against. I’ll be asking some other councillors where their heads were at on this and doing further research to report back on the whole voting process, including the amendments (where more councillors supported our needs). As I said in my speech, it is 100% for developers and activists, 0% for community members…
I am also very disappointed with the city administration, as they once again showed bias and lack of consideration for the citizens. They reiterated that our mitigation ideas could be handled in other ways than the LAP. Before, they suggested that we could express our ideas at Development Permit, but they know as well as we do that if these policies are not in statute, then we have no means to insist on our ideas being followed, developers and file managers can ignore us, and we have no basis for appeal. At the hearing, they threw out that we could have the ideas incorporated in the Land Use Bylaw – but the LUB is supposed to be general and universal, it will not have specific policies for specific communities. The LAP is exactly where these local ideas belong. Councillor Wong also asked city administration to confirm the direct quotes that we had provided from the Transit Oriented Development principles. City administration would not directly admit that, yes indeed, the TOD does say what we quoted. They should be unbiased civil servants and be willing to confirm facts. Finally, they ‘defended’ their lack of engagement about the latest revision by saying that they ‘mined the previous engagements’. But the previous engagements were not about the latest significant increase in density and impact on our community. New people are affected and now have an opinion and want a say. Many people feel more strongly that this plan goes too far. And none of these current opinions were collected or considered. This lack of engagement on the final revision made a mockery of the whole engagement process.
I want to thank everyone again for taking the time to try to participate in good faith in what should be a democratic process… it’s really too bad that we didn’t get real compromise and real collaboration in return. I will write further on this in future, and we can discuss as a community what our options are going forward. We can discuss and answer questions at [email protected]. Please also consider joining our land use email committee to participate in future discussion, to learn about each proposal in our community, and help with community feedback.
Beth Atkinson
Director – Land Use, Hounsfield Heights-Briar Hill Community Association
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