Appeal withdrawn: City firms up OMB stance as second appeal pulled back

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

The residents of Oshawa and advocates for a green Oshawa waterfront will have some time to wait before sharing their views with the Ontario Municipal Board on a proposed subdivision application on a stretch of the city’s Lake Ontario shoreline.

With that said, the City of Oshawa has firmed up their stance on how they plan to oppose the proposed application which could bring hundreds of housing units to a green patch of land south of Renaissance Drive and west of Park Road South.

According to Paul Ralph, the city’s commissioner of development services, the city will be relying strongly on the fact that the land in question has been named a significant habitat for the monarch butterfly by the Central Lake Ontario Conservation Authority (CLOCA).

In late 2017, a report from CLOCA identified that the number of monarch butterflies on the site, as stated in a report commissioned by the developer, was above the threshold to label the site as a significant habitat for the monarch butterfly.

This also isn’t the first time CLOCA has raised the issue as an original report from the conservation authority following the appearance of the proposals in January of 2016 noted similar sentiments.

“Given the location of this property on the north shore of Lake Ontario, effort should be made to characterize this site in terms of a migratory stopover for Monarch Butterflies and Migratory Birds and how the proposed development potentially impacts that function,” the CLOCA report reads.

The original statements were written in response to an initial environmental impact study that surprisingly made no mention of monarch butterflies. The initial CLOCA comments were the reason a subsequent report was triggered.

“This regional corridor, while not continuous, recognizes the important function of east-west movement between the large habitat patches along the waterfront and provides valuable migratory stopover function. The omission of the migratory function this property provides, is seen as a significant information gap that a revised report must address,” the report stated.

Now, the city is hoping to use those previous comments and CLOCA’s recent recommendation to their advantage when things go before the Ontario Municipal Board. However, when that will be, is still up in the air.

“I’m going to guess that they were fully inundated with appeals prior to the April 3 deadline across Ontario. So, they’re going to be very busy,” Ralph says.

That April 3 deadline referred to the switch at the provincial level from the previous OMB process to the new Environmental Land Tribunals process.

Letters from a lawyer representing the project’s owner SO Developments, came at the end of March, only a few short days before the shift.

With that said, Ralph acknowledges that despite the ongoing appeal and call for residents to block all development at the site, he says that’s not the reality of the situation.

“To be fair, there will be some development on this property,” he says, pointing to the three stub streets that run south from Renaissance Drive that were always intended to connect to future development. “From a planning context there will be some form of development, it’s just trying to figure out at the board, what is the development limits in relation to wildlife habitat and open space along our waterfront.”

However, the second proposal from the same developer, this one on the corner of Park Road South and Phillip Murray Avenue is now taking a different path.

Initially, a similar appeal was filed to the OMB, but a recent letter from the developer’s lawyer announced they were cancelling the appeal, effectively putting the decision back in council’s hands.

The decision followed a letter from General Motors, a initial opponent of the proposal, that noted the automaker had come to terms with the developer on their issues.

“Over the past several months, GM has been engaged in discussions with both the City and the Applicant in an effort to resolve these concerns. GM has reached a resolution on the issues that are within the Applicant’s control,” the letter reads.

For that reason, Ralph says a report to be released on May 1 is set to lay out the city’s stance on what to do with the proposal that could see homes constructed on the site.

“From what I understand, from the developer’s perspective, they feel they’ve addressed all of the technical issues from CLOCA, the Oshawa Environmental Advisory Committee, for example, the region, on traffic, and GM on noise, air quality (and) all those things,” Ralph says. “They feel that they’ve done everything that’s been asked of them in terms of the technical issues and they believe from a planning context that you’ll find throughout an urban area, that townhouses next to semis are compatible.”

That report will appear at the Development Services Committee on May 7.