Saugeen Shores is hoping for federal funding to pilot a housing and affordable housing planning program that would speed the construction approval process up by at least half.
While Town reps were in Ottawa this summer for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference, they also met with federal government reps to talk about financial support for the implementation of the system.
Back in December of 2022, the Town announced it was exploring using a Community Planning Permit System (CPPS), a legislative tool approved by the province to help the approval process based on a set of criteria.
Mayor Luke Charbonneau says it’s a major project to undertake, explaining, “We haven’t been able to actually do the work to implement it because it’s a pricey initiative. It re-imagines our whole planning system.”
The Town wants to use it to speed up the approval process for affordable housing and to increase housing supply. By using the system, housing construction would only need a single application. It would combine zoning, site planning and minor variance decisions. The Town would be able to approve or deny an application within a shorter timeline, as opposed to the standard 45 days.
Charbonneau says, “The whole approval process combines it all together and puts it into a permit. So you go and you say to our staff, I want to build a new affordable apartment building. They look at it and if it requires zoning, site planning or whatever, they can just approve it in one permit rather than you having to go through three separate processes and have to go to council and have a lot of process and a lot of expense.”
He explains, “It speeds the process up dramatically and creates certainty because before you even make that application, you can look at the plan and you can know what you need to do to get approval for this project that you want to do rather than have to guess at what council might say, or guess at what might come out at the end of three separate processes at two different level of government.”
Charbonneau adds, “It streamlines and simplifies the process, creates certainty for people who want to build things. Anything that brings down the cost and makes things easier, we hope will remove barriers to getting housing built.”
The Town says even though it is a commonly used tool across western Canada, it is rare in Ontario, and Saugeen Shores would be the first community in the province to use a CPPS to specifically target the creation of housing.
Charbonneau says, “This is a thing that the Province has enabled under the Planning Act for a very long time but very few municipalities have picked it up and actually done it. We think it’s very much worth trying.”
He adds, says the system has been well received by representatives of the federal government in the meetings that have taken place about it, but the Town is still looking for the money to do it. “It’s just like everything, you have to keep making your case and going before them and hope that eventually you kind of get through the wall and they understand what you’re talking about and decide to take a chance on what you’re proposing.”
The Town included the CPPS as one of its proposed initiatives in the Housing Accelerator Funding application it submitted last month to the Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation.
The Town has a number of resources to explain its proposed planning tool on its website: https://www.saugeenshores.ca/en/invest-and-plan/community-permit-planning-system.aspx