[All] Waterloo Regional Official Plan Council Meeting Outcome

[Kevin Thomason]

Hi GREN folks,

It was absolutely fantastic to see so many articulate citizens and groups delivering such powerful presentations to Regional Council yesterday!  Thank you to everyone who delegated, e-mailed, and phoned Regional officials along with Council.  It’s clear that we had a considerable impact and I’m so glad that we were able to provide a strong community voice to balance the aggressive land speculator lobbying for development that Council was hearing.

There were over 20 delegations, very little overlap, and a strong clear message sent to Council about our concerns with the ROP process - that it needs to be far more ambitious to address our pending climate crisis.

It was great to see the motions introduced by Council and I think that we overachieved 120%+ on what we set out to do two weeks ago:

	- we raised awareness and had dozens of people & groups to delegate and write letters to Council expressing serious concerns about the ROP and process,
	- we successfully stopped the decision on the Recommended Growth Scenario #2 planned for Council today and bought more time (though not sure how much more),
	- we managed to get a Fourth and a Fifth Growth Scenario for more ambitious plans on the table exceeding what we thought might be possible to direct Staff come back with,
	- we got broad agreement that the public engagement and consultation was totally insufficient and secured a commitment for far more public consultation and information moving forward.

This is far beyond what anyone thought possible just days ago and is an impressive accomplishment.

However:

	- we don’t really know how detailed or good new Scenarios will be and they could be easily designed to fail or simply confuse issues,
	- we don’t even know when the next meeting or decision point is or any of the expectations,
	- most of the public engagement and consultation planned seems to be so far into the future that it could be too late to make any significant or meaningful changes.
	
And:

	- the Land Needs Analysis (LNA) motion that was introduced by Regional Councillor Mike Harris is quite concerning as the wording seems to imply that they can’t even come back with Scenario #4 and #5 until the LNA is done,
	- the LNA doesn’t sound like it will be completed until February/March which is too far from now,
	- the flawed provincial LNA methodoolgy will dramatically overdesignate farmland for development and we shouldn’t have the future of our community determined by land speculators,
	- we aren’t going to succeed on climate change if we can’t get a more progressive provincial government and continue our innovative leadership here in Waterloo with more sustainable growth solutions. 

As expected the land speculators are desperate and are going to do everything possible to get the development they want.  We are going to have to figure out how to overcome the flawed LNA process mandated by Doug Ford.  If anyone has contacts within the university planning schools, planning associations, or access to other LNA experts I’d love to know their suggestions.

We’ve stopped the train and gotten a recognition that better is needed.  The community is now aware of these issues and concern is growing.  We need to continue to articulate our visions for the community we want to see and ensure that it is citizens - not speculators deciding our future.

We have the upcoming webinar on the ROP on Monday night (November 15th at 7:00pm) that GREN is hosting along with numerous local environmental groups.  Hopefully you can register and join us:

	https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/community-webinar-on-growth-plan-for-waterloo-region-tickets-204795658327 <https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/community-webinar-on-growth-plan-for-waterloo-region-tickets-204795658327>

Well done on everything so far.  It was an impressive day and we have made good progress in getting a better, more sustainable Regional Official Plan.  Please share any way that you may be able to help and any thoughts or ideas!

Cheers,
Kevin.  

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Kevin Thomason
Vice-Chair, Grand River Environmental Network

1115 Cedar Grove Road
Waterloo, Ontario Canada  N2J 3Z4

Phone: (519) 888-0519
Mobile Phone/WhatsApp: (519) 240-1648
Twitter: @kthomason
E-mail: kevinthomason at mac.com <mailto:kevinthomason at mac.com>

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