Tag: Rawlson King

Should a portion of Stanley Ave. be closed for good?

Posted on by Christina Leadlay

By Jason Tavoularis (This article appeared in the December 2021 edition of the New Edinburgh News)

I would like to start by thanking Marc D’Orgeville for serving as chair of the New Edinburgh Community Alliance’s (NECA) Traffic and Safety (T&S) committee these past few years, and for encouraging me to step up to replace him. Marc came to my home on Dufferin Road recently to complete the transition. We discussed various T&S matters like Dufferin Road’s new speed humps, a project we had worked on together, liaising with City Councillor Rawlson King’s office and adjacent residents.

But it was the Stanley Avenue road closure in late October/early November that really animated us. One of the documents Marc transferred to me as the new T&S chair was NECA’s 1997 Community Directed Traffic Calming Study report which recommended closing Stanley Avenue to traffic from the New Edinburgh Fieldhouse (203 Stanley Ave.) to the entrance of River Lane on Dufferin Road. This recommendation never moved forward due to the potential for negative spin-off effects.

The recent temporary closure inadvertently gave us an interesting proof point that seemingly justifies further study towards a Stanley Avenue revamp without through traffic. Marc and I live on opposite ends of the closure that was recommended in the NECA traffic calming report almost 25 years ago. Neither of us witnessed a negative impact from the recent closure. We did observe a more relaxing atmosphere in Stanley Park without cars driving past the playground. Did any other park users perceive this? Surely, there must have been some traffic diverted from Stanley Avenue onto Crichton or MacKay Streets, but did those living on these streets notice?

The path towards permanently changing Stanley Avenue in such a way is a long one that would need broad support to succeed, including that of residents, our community associations and our councillor –no small feat to achieve. But I think the potential benefits make this worth revisiting. I’m optimistic that this stretch of road in question can be redesigned to keep commuters away from the playground and the dog park without loss of parking or green space. Maybe a proposed plan would include a road segment repurposed as a vibrant gathering spot, like a skatepark or a vegetated area with seating?

I would like to hear your traffic and safety ideas and concerns for New Edinburgh, including this big idea for Stanley Avenue. Did you experience any negative effects from the recent closure on this street? What worries you most about a prolonged closure? How would you like to see a stretch of the road reclaimed? Any parking arrangement ideas for that tricky road bend? Would you support a temporary closure, perhaps during the summer months, to allow the effects to be evaluated more scientifically?

Please mail me at info@newedinburgh.ca

City’s draft Official Plan is worrisome and aggressively anti-urban

Posted on by Christina Leadlay

By Ray Boomgaardt. This article originally appeared in the April 2021 edition of the New Edinburgh News.

In November 2020, the City of Ottawa published a draft revision of its Official Plan, intended to guide the growth of the city for the next 25 years. It invited public comments on the four volumes (Vol. 1 alone is more than 250 pages long). The Board of the New Edinburgh Community Alliance (NECA) submitted its comments on Mar. 12 (find our submission at newedinburgh.ca). Our City Councillor Rawlson King has invited residents to make any further comments to his office.

The City terms its revisions to its Official Plan as a “New Official Plan.” That’s actually a fair description, because the New Plan reverses many of the policies of the existing Plan. The extreme departure from existing policies is very strange – even bizarre – because the existing Plan is well written, has been regularly updated by Council, and seems to have served the City rather well. The New Plan is full of empty jargon, reverses not only well-established policies but also many recent Council decisions, and attacks fundamental rules and procedures protecting Ottawa’s urban neighbourhoods. 

Having been critical of the City in the past, it feels strange to be suddenly noticing all the merits of the existing Plan. But that is perhaps the easiest way to convey to you, dear reader, how worrisome this revision, the draft New Plan, is. 

Fifty years ago, the ideas of urban-renewal activist Jane Jacobs lead the citizens of Toronto in their campaign to stop the Spadina Expressway. In 1979, those same ideas galvanized New Edinburgh to stop the Vanier Arterial. Perhaps the writers of the New Plan were indulging in some black humour when they decided to label the Queensway, Ottawa’s expressway, a scenic route (yes, really!). But we digress. This article is not about that bit of Orwellian nonsense, although we do think it illustrates how poorly thought out and aggressively anti-urban the New Plan is.

One of NECA’s core values is our commitment to Jacobs’ understanding of what makes a city thriving and liveable: the city is made up of neighbourhoods. The existing Plan, was also explicitly based on this idea. The proposed revised Plan talks about developing “15-minute neighbourhoods,” but then repeatedly undermines urban neighbourhoods.

Let’s look at some examples.

An overview of the Plans

The existing Plan states: “This Plan manages this growth in ways that reinforce the qualities of the city most valued by its residents: its distinctly liveable communities, its green and open character, and its unique characteristics.”… “The environmental integrity of the city is reinforced throughout the Plan.”

The New Plan replaces these four commitments – to community, greenspace, unique characteristics and environment – with a far weaker and vaguer sentence: “we will need to find ways of supporting city neighbourhoods … as healthy, inclusive and vibrant places,” offering vague support for “healthy, inclusive and vibrant places.”

For existing urban areas, “healthy” seems to mean adequate parks and recreation facilities, and might even be construed as a back-handed reference to environmental integrity (i.e., a weakening of existing policy, but not a complete reversal); “inclusive” seems to mean more high-density buildings without lawns or trees (what the Plan calls the “missing middle,” i.e., with no accommodation for communities, greenspace, or unique characteristics); and “vibrant” seems to mean rapidly transforming with high-density infill (the existing Plan supports infill, but doesn’t require it to be dense, and does make it subject to the four commitments.)  

NECA has been fighting for the four commitments in the existing Plan to be respected by new development proposals; the New Plan simply deletes the commitments altogether. 

Secondary plans

NECA and other community associations have done a lot of work on our vision for the development of the Beechwood Avenue corridor. The new draft Official Plan proposes to designate Beechwood from the St. Patrick bridge to Hemlock Road as a “Mainstreet Corridor.” The good part of this proposal is that new projects along the Corridor are required to have ground-level commercial units and to provide extra-wide sidewalks. 

On the other hand, there is a series of additional elements that community associations would like to see included to help ensure appropriate development along Beechwood. Under both the existing Plan and the draft New Plan, secondary development plans can be initiated by the City, and, when approved, become part of the Official Plan. 

However, the draft New Plan introduces a new prerequisite for secondary plans: “the City shall require a landowners’ agreement. This Agreement shall be provided to the City prior to the commencement of the Secondary Plan. The … agreement shall include … how development and density are to be distributed, as well as how the costs of studies and plans will be divided.“

In short, landowners who do not agree with a proposed planning process can veto it simply by not signing a landowner’s agreement.

Again, the City has simply deleted the prior ability to receive community input. 

Dealing with growth

The New Plan notes that provincial policy requires the City to designate enough land to account for growth over the next 25 years; and that the City expects to grow to 1.4 million people by 2046, an annual growth rate of about 1.2 per cent.

Over the past 30 years, the number of living units in New Edinburgh has probably grown at a rate of more than 1.2 per cent annually. So you might think that the City would use us as a model for the future. You would be wrong.

The New Plan proposes that 47 per cent of the growth will occur within the existing urban boundary (this is targeted to rise to 60 per cent by 2046, sec 2.2.1(1)), 46 per cent in the currently undeveloped land at the periphery of the urban boundary, and seven per cent in rural areas. So far, so good.

The New Plan goes on to state: “The target amount of dwelling growth represents the proportion of new residential dwelling units, excluding institutional and collective units such as seniors’ and student residences, based upon building permit issuance within the built-up portion of the urban area.”

Apparently, seniors’ units do not count. Really: that’s in the New Plan! New Edinburgh has three long-term care facilities built in the last 30 years. But they wouldn’t count under the New Plan’s math. 

Dealing with intensification

Fun fact: the draft New Plan uses the word “transect” as a noun, with a meaning unknown to either the Oxford or Random House dictionaries.

Here we go. In the inner urban “transect” (which includes New Edinburgh), the New Plan provides that “The minimum residential dwelling density …for each lot” is 80 units per hectare. This intensification requirement would apply to any new construction in New Edinburgh outside the Heritage District. The density requirement along Beechwood Avenue is 80 to 160 units per hectare.

A hectare is 10,000m2. So, at 80 units per hectare, each unit occupies 125 m2, or 1,345ft2.  This is the exterior dimension, so the interior living space on each floor would be about 1,200ft2 assuming 100 per cent lot coverage. Therefore, if one wants to build a two-storey 1,800ft2 house (at 900ft2 per floor) on a 1,200ft2 lot, there is only 300ft2 of space for lot setbacks, a deck and parking. For lots that have approximately 15m frontage or wider, at least 50 per cent of the units developed on that lot must have three or more bedrooms. 

If you know the size of lots on your street, you can calculate what requirements a new development would need to meet. If a lot is 50×100 = 5000ft2 (464m2), the building would need to have four units to meet the standard, and two of them would need to have three bedrooms, since the lot is more than 15m wide. Assuming 50 per cent lot coverage, 2500ft2, and three floors, this provides 7,500ft2, or approximately 1,900ft2 for each unit (exterior dimensions).

Remember, these are minimum requirements. Presumably the by-laws will be amended to permit this kind of intensification. 

Conclusion

You tell me. What’s up with City Hall?

Ray Boomgaardt is a board member of the New Edinburgh Community Alliance.

Let’s keep the conversation going about policing

Posted on by Christina Leadlay

By Samantha McAleese and Marc d’Orgeville. This article originally appeared in the Feb 2021 edition of New Edinburgh News.

Like most community newspapers, the New Edinburgh News provides space to share thoughts, concerns, ideas, and resources that might spark meaningful conversations and connections with neighbours. This article is the result of that particular power of the press. 

In the NEN October edition, Samantha McAleese wrote an article about people experiencing homelessness and living in encampments along the Rideau River. She asked neighbours to connect with community-based services and to advocate for affordable housing instead of relying on the police to respond to poverty and homelessness.

In the December edition, Marc d’Orgeville (chair of the New Edinburgh Community Alliance’s traffic and safety committee) summarized a conversation he had with a community police officer to remind New Edinburgh residents of the process for filing police reports. Advice received from the officer on dealing with issues like break-ins or speeding drivers was to call the police and call them more often, as police rely on community members to be “the eyes on the ground.”  

Samantha received comments about the December article from local advocates, which included: “It sounds like your neighbours are setting up a snitch line,” and “They won’t be happy until there is a cop car on every corner.” These comments were not meant to dismiss the consequences of any violence, conflict, loss, or harm experienced by individuals, but rather to temper the impulse to call the police for every little thing. 

These two articles highlight the need for ongoing conversations about policing and community safety in New Edinburgh and Ottawa. In a neighbourhood as privileged and resourced as New Edinburgh, we should be actively engaged in discussions about the cycle of ever-increasing police funding that does not address root causes of harm, such as poverty.

One conversation started at the December meeting of NECA’s Traffic and Safety Committee, chaired by Marc. Samantha attended the meeting to address concerns and to ask questions about the purpose and intent of Marc’s article. Marc had not imagined that a reminder for residents to report local incidents to the police would elicit such a strong reaction, but he welcomed the opportunity for this more critical discussion around policing. 

As a reactive service, the police rely on calls and reporting to respond to incidents and decide how to allocate resources. Unfortunately, calling the police does not always resolve the problem or make us feel safer. Furthermore, over-reporting maintains the impression that increasing police resources in our community is a viable solution to preventing harm. The need for alternatives to the police is clear and requires strong advocacy. 


Marc and Samantha’s conversation illuminated not conflict but rather commonalities in how we think about police and community safety. For example, we both support City Councillor Rawlson King’s decision to vote against a budget increase for the Ottawa Police Service. Like Rawlson, we both agree with de-tasking the Ottawa Police Service. Armed police officers are not a suitable response to mental health crises, nor do police play a role in preventing or ending homelessness. Additionally, we (along with others in New Edinburgh) appreciate the councillor’s ongoing advocacy for additional funding for social services, supports, and resources that prioritize community care. Finally, we look forward to supporting Rawlson’s work on the poverty reduction strategy for Rideau-Rockcliffe. 


The initial meeting ended with an agreement to keep the conversation going between NECA and all neighbours in the Burgh. Together, we can continue to advocate for programs, resources, supports, and responses that keep care at the forefront. This advocacy is vital for Black, Indigenous, racialized, and unhoused neighbours who are at an increased risk of experiencing police violence and being criminalized. 

One way to advocate is to participate in public consultations. The City of Ottawa has begun Phase 2 of their consultation process for the Community Safety and Well-Being Plan, and we encourage Burgh residents to participate online: engage.ottawa.ca/Community-Safety-Well-Being-Plan.

For a lot of people (especially white people), 2020 was a year of listening and learning more intently about the desperate need for alternatives to policing from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) communities. Affordable housing, mental health supports, safe consumption sites, additional public health resources, youth leadership programs, and community-led conflict resolution and restorative justice options are just a few examples. Let 2021 be the year of acting on these calls for transformation.

NECA’s Traffic and Safety committee meetings take place at 7 p.m. every fourth Monday of the month – the next meeting is Feb. 22. Anyone interested in attending should contact marc.dorgeville@utoronto.ca.


Samantha McAleese is a researcher and advocate who lives in New Edinburgh. Marc d’Orgeville is the chair of NECA’s Traffic and Safety committee.