Ottawa City Council: Five key issues to watch this fall

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Mayor Mark Sutcliffe and Ottawa city councillors are back in their chairs at Andrew S. Haydon Hall on Wednesday. The work of the mayor and council doesn’t exactly shut down over the summer, but the first meeting of the school year undeniably marks a new agenda at city hall. Here is a look at some of the big topics we can expect to see in 2024-25.

Brace for budget drama after Ottawa’s summer of discontent

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If you don’t think Mayor Sutcliffe has spent his summer worrying about the city budget — well, good morning, Rip Van Winkle.

In August, while most city residents were soaking up the sunshine, the mayor was launching his Fairness for Ottawa campaign, urging people to join him in demanding more money for the city from the federal and provincial governments. The feds in particular, Sutcliffe said, were stiffing the city on PILTs, the payments in lieu of the property tax that the city can’t charge it.

The feds get to decide “how much their property is worth, what property class it belongs to, what tax rate they pay, all on their own. So, if they want to pay less, they pay less,” Sutcliffe said, in a message aimed straight at voters. “And they do pay less … much less than they should.”

PILT was worth $162 million last year, which sounds like a lot, but is really just a pittance in the city’s $4.6-billion budget. But, when you’re scrimping, as every homeowner knows, every million counts.

For its part, the federal government seems unimpressed. Kanata-Carleton MP Jenna Sudds, a cabinet minister, the ranking Liberal MP for the city and a former Ottawa city councillor to boot, said the city needed to get its own house in order. Sutcliffe has stubbornly clung to his election promise to hold tax increases at 2.5 per cent for his first two years in office.

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“I look to other major cities across Canada and we’re seeing property tax increases of seven, eight, nine, 10 per cent,” Sudds said.

Just down Highway 401, in fact, Toronto taxpayers were hit with a whopping 9.5-per-cent increase this year. Of course, raising taxes is only half of the budget equation. On the other site is cutting services. Get ready for some nasty debate.

“I think, as the mayor has said, he’s got some very large financial challenges in front of him and in front of council,” Sudds said.

Indeed.

A new train line and a big deficit face OC Transpo this fall

This fall, God willing and the creeks don’t rise, Ottawa’s north-south Trillium Line will re-open, the first part of LRT Stage 2. The project is already more than two years late and as recently as this spring Transit General Manager Renée Amilcar was hoping the Trillium Line would open “this spring.”

Of course, if there is one lesson from Stage 1 LRT, it was this: Don’t rush things. The city says it has learned from the mistakes with the Confederation Line, outlining in detail how the new train line will be tested and assessed, including daily updates to councillors.

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When it opens, the Trillium Line will add 16 kilometres of track and 12 new stations, nearly doubling the number of stations on the system. You’ll finally be able to take the train to Carleton University and the Ottawa airport.

Of course, the new train comes just as OC Transpo announced a reduction in off-peak service, meaning longer wait times for those travelling in the evening and at night.

That brings us to another issue: OC Transpo’s crippling deficit. Work from home and the loss of daily public servants commuting have devastated ridership, meaning a loss of $36 million a year in fare revenue. It will be years before ridership returns even to pre-pandemic levels — and the LRT was built on forecasts that transit ridership would soar once the train was running.

The city is in a “transit crisis,” Sutcliffe said, with OC Transpo facing a $140-million deficit for the next three or four years. That alone will mean a 37-per-cent hike in the transit levy, which, when transferred to your tax bill, would account for a seven-per-cent increase just on its own.

A ‘tsunami’ of change coming to Ottawa as the city reviews its zoning bylaw

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Residents got a glimpse in April of what Ottawa might look like a decade from now after the city completes its Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw Amendment. Now that the public consultations are underway, that vision should be getting clearer.

“My significant concern is that the public has no idea of the tsunami that’s coming,” River Ward Coun. Riley Brockington said when the first draft was introduced.

The city says the amended rules will simplify zoning bylaws — and it will — but it still means wading through hundreds of pages of sometimes dense legalese to fully understand what’s coming. But you can also see what your future neighbourhood will look like by using an interactive map on the city’s Engage Ottawa website, that lets you view the Alta Vista of today, for example, and the Alta Vista of tomorrow.

In short, expect to see denser neighbourhoods, with taller, multi-unit housing, less parking and more walkable neighbourhoods. That house across the street might have a small business, perhaps a child care, a “low-risk” food service (“baked goods, breads, cakes, chocolates, hard candies and brittles, fudge and toffees, granola, trail mix, nuts and seeds, and coffee beans and tea leaves,” according to the city), even a small manufacturing business. Trees are to get more protection, too, with plans to use porous, natural areas to help absorb stormwater.

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Briefings on the proposed zoning amendments are being held in each ward and the city is accepting submissions on Engage Ottawa. Draft No. 2 is to be ready by December with another round of consultation beginning in the new year.

Listening to the concerns of sometimes-ignored rural residents

The map crops up every few council meetings: the enormous V-shaped City of Ottawa with the cities of Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver superimposed and all contained within Ottawa’s boundaries. Or sometimes it’s the municipalities of the GTA: Brampton, Pickering, North York, Mississauga, etc., etc.

OK, OK. We get it. Ottawa is really freakin’ big. In fact, 80 per cent of the city’s land is composed of forest, farmland, fields and bogs, dotted with the occasional hamlet or village. One of Sutcliffe’s early promises was to hold a Rural Summit and the first of those public meetings were held in April.

It was Ottawa’s first such summit since 2005 and was proposed by first-term Coun. Clarke Kelly of West Carleton-March Ward, the city’s largest.

“When we as a city set policies that affect that whole area, without really looking at the effect those policies have on rural areas, I think that’s been noticed by people over the last couple of decades,” Kelly told the Citizen last winter. “It’s a chance to have a conversation about the important role that the rural wards play in our city, what the unique challenges are in providing services across such a vast area, with fewer people in it. I think it’s long overdue that we have more conversations.”

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Some common complaints are poor road maintenance, waste collection (rural councillors led the opposition to limit the number of items collected on garbage day), the lack of services available in rural communities, and excessive speeding, to name a few. The latter will get some relief when the first of eight automated speed enforcement cameras are deployed in rural villages in a pilot project.

The input collected will be compiled in an “As We Heard It” report that the city will make available in time for the Rural Summit itself, slated for November.

Moving closer to another redevelopment of Lansdowne Park, probably

Whither Lansdowne?

It’s been a torturous journey so far for the city’s (and Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group’s) new vision for one of Ottawa’s crown jewels. The mayor unveiled the plan last November with the de rigueur artist concepts of a revitalized Lansdowne. The new plan comes with a hefty $419-million price tag, including $250 million for the new 5,500-seat arena, or “event space” as it’s called, and another $169.5 million for the north-side stands, which will seat 11,200. Two residential towers of 40 and 25 storeys will ensure a healthy supply of people to keep the place buzzing.

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The city said it learned from the mistakes of Lansdowne 1.0 — are you seeing a pattern here? — which has lost money every year, accumulating a $165-million loss for OSEG since 2012. And the “waterfall” of revenue the city hoped from the Lansdowne 1.0? It hasn’t generated a cent.

But Sutcliffe maintains that, once rent is factored in, plus a rejigged “waterfall” formula and the future sale of air rights for the towers, Lansdowne 2.0 will cost taxpayers a paltry $5 million a year in interest payments.

The new plan has its critics. The arena is too small, they say, particularly with the wild success of the Ottawa PWHL team. It chews up too much of Lansdowne’s Great Lawn. The new stands aren’t covered. The high rises are too tall … But an appeal by the Glebe Community Association to the Ontario Land Tribunal was rejected, giving the city one of several green lights it needs before a final go/no go decision comes sometime in 2025.

But don’t hit the gas pedal just yet. it’s not exactly a red light, but Ottawa’s auditor general lit a giant amber one in June with an “agile audit” that said the city could be underestimating the cost of Lansdowne 2.0 by as much as $74 million.

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“We believe the city, in some instances, chose estimates that were on the lower end of existing ranges,” the report from auditor Nathalie Gougeon said at the time. “Given the inherent risks related to construction, and this project in particular, we believe this approach has resulted in some construction estimates that are optimistic.”

Buckle up.

One last thing … how transparent is Ottawa, really?

Sutcliffe promised a more transparent city government. So did Wendy Stephanson when she assumed the herculean job of city manager.

So far, so good.

Mostly.

The city has held numerous “technical briefings” to bring the public up to speed on big issues like OC Transpo’s finances, the wheel problems that have bedevilled the Confederation Line, the Solid Waste Management Plan, the testing protocol for the Trillium Line and the zoning bylaw amendment.

Sutcliffe and key councillors and city staff are available for Q&As with reporters after every council and committee meetings (Sutcliffe, a former journalist himself, including at the Ottawa Citizen, has been heard to rue how few reporters are at these briefings). Reporters have been offered one-on-one briefings with high-level managers to help them understand complicated issues.

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On occasion, the mayor makes his pitch directly to voters, such as this summer’s Fairness for Ottawa speech and an earlier press conference on a special housing crisis task force. Then there are his own podcasts, monthly Mayor’s Breakfast series and his daily “Good Morning Ottawa” postings on the social media site X typically from his morning run.

All well and good. Just don’t ask about the city’s out-of-court legal settlements over LRT contracts.

In June, councillors OK’d the payments of undisclosed amounts to undisclosed recipients for work on various sections of the LRT that are … undisclosed.

Details of the settlements, which are being delegated to Stephanson to resolve, “are not to be reported out publicly, as they relate to litigation and are covered by solicitor-client and settlement privilege,” the council motion stated.

According to Sutcliffe, most of the settlements are due to pandemic-related delays and aren’t unique to Ottawa, but have been part of major infrastructure projects throughout North America.

But, as columnist Randall Denley wrote, “City councillors have decided that the benefits of secrecy trump the virtues of public accountability.

“It’s best for councillors who don’t want to justify the payout and best for the companies who want to keep their sweet deals out of sight. We’ll never know if it was best for taxpayers.”

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