Citizens pack council chambers to protest waterfront development
Oshawa City Hall was packed Monday evening for a public meeting on a proposed development near the city’s waterfront. Residents spoke out against it, saying it would harm the environment, while General Motors said it could prevent it from developing the Oshawa Assembly.
By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express
For nearly seven hours, citizens took their turns slamming a pair of proposed new developments near Oshawa’s waterfront during a public planning act meeting in the council chambers on Monday evening.
The meeting, which ran until nearly 2 a.m., saw more than 200 residents attend including several newcomers to the city, shifting in from Toronto, former Oshawa city councillors and one young 12-year-old who urged council to save the city’s green space. It was suggested several times by residents that the city buy back the lands and halt any future development.
The pair of proposals being put forward by Graywood Developments on lands owned by SO Development Inc. are both along Park Road South, south of Philip Murray Drive.
The first proposal, known as Block A, is a 1.12-hectare wedge of land directly on the corner of Phillip Murray and Park Road South. The application before council would see eight block townhouses, each as tall as three storeys, be constructed with a total of 56 dwellings and 132 parking spaces. The second, known as Block B, is a much larger proposal for a nearly 26-acre site sitting directly on the waterfront of Lake Ontario south of Renaissance Drive west of Park Road South. Block B could see 216 units erected on the site, including 184 single detached dwellings and 32 semi-detached units.
Both developments saw a rash of similar concerns from residents directly adjacent to the sites and from nearby neighbourhoods, expressing concerns for safety with traffic and intensification in an area that already sees heavy traffic during GM’s shift change (the Oshawa Assembly sits directly across the road from the Block A proposal), as well as concern for migrating birds, other wildlife and even monarch butterflies that use the area.
“It has to be one of the dumbest development ideas ever proposed,” said former councillor Brian Nicholson, who also lives in the area.
“Don’t allow yourself to be pressured into a process that makes no sense,” he told councillors. “This is not good planning. This is not good sense.”
Nicholson was not the only one with strong words for the proposal, which was presented at the meeting by Ryan Guetter, a representative with Weston Consulting, who prepared the proposal for the land owner and developer.
Tragedy. Eyesore. Cash Grab. Short-sighted. Obcene. Greedy. These are only a few of the words local residents had for the proposals, which also happened to draw the concern of GM itself, with its corporate representatives writing to the city with their own opposition to the site, which could possibly handcuff them from doing any development on their site in the future.
“The proposed recommendations are completely inadequate and troubling,” GM’s letter reads. “This appears to limit our ability to economically develop our lands if necessary in the future.”
“We are very concerned about what this would mean,” said Gord Vickers, a representative with the Unifor Local 222 Retirees, noting that if the development is enough to raise the hackles of the automaker, it has big implications. “If they object, there’s a plan, there’s something that’s going to happen.”
According to studies done by consultants retained by Weston as part of the proposal, which included looking into traffic, noise, odour, environmental impacts, archaeological assessments, erosion and several other factors, the Block A proposal would place homes within a buffer set by the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change and would hinder GM’s ability to further develop that southern edge of their site due to noise and odour concerns.
“The last thing we want to be doing is adding more hurdles and more barriers for the retention of those jobs within our community,” Nicholson said.
For Block B, the main concern of those in attendance was the loss of the green space surrounding Oshawa’s waterfront trail, which is home to deer, owls, bats and many other animals and insects. The current plan would see all of the trees on the site razed, and current plans have no designation of parkland to replace it, with the developer choosing to pay cash in lieu of the city’s requirements.
In terms of environmental assessments, Guetter noted that an environmental impact assessment was not required for Block A, but an in-depth look was done for Block B, which included a look at the trees, mostly “immature pioneer species” according to a planning justification report, the loss of wetlands, and noted that the removal of the fields would not eliminate any habitat for endangered or threatened species.
However, many residents noted that monarch butterflies are common on the property, which are currently not labelled as endangered or threatened, but are a species of special concern according to the province, meaning they could easily become threatened or endangered due to certain circumstances. The butterflies were not mentioned in the report.
“All I can say is that we’ll take that under advisement,” Guetter said, when the omission from the environmental report was brought to his attention.
Following planning act procedures, the correspondence was referred back to city staff for further consideration and a report with a recommendation to come at a later date.