Posts Tagged ‘voting’

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The Way we Grow Up: Remarks on the MDP

Feb
23
2010

Tonight Council gave second reading approval to our Municipal Development Plan. After considerable debate it’s more or less finished, subject to approval from the Capital Region Board, followed by third reading in May or June.

We debated the restriction on gravel mining in the river valley, which was upheld in a close vote. The Kanata Metis gravel put proposal is still free to come forward on its own merits and will get its day in front of Council.

We also debated growth allocation between suburban and established areas, and density targets, which picks up on a conversation I blogged about previously concerning development trajectory in our city. On this, I proposed a small but significant shift in language that the 25% target for infill vs. suburban growth is now a minimum, not an aspiration, which was approved unanimously.

It came time to speak to the main document and this is more or less what I said tonight:

I sought this seat to be part of this work and I am proud of most of this plan.

I am proud of the entrenchment of the link between planning and transportation; that most crucial link between what we build and where, and how we move about our city.

I am proud that we are so clearly committed to providing meaningful alternatives to car reliance with transit – especially LRT – and with better facilities for active transportation.

I am proud that we’ve (hopefully) put to rest the question of mining and land speculation in our river valley.

I am proud that we’ve joined cities around the world in acknowledging food and urban agriculture as key considerations in our planning.

I’m most proud of the policies we added designed to make medium-density living actually work for families with children. City council has already moved in this direction with the approval of Strathearn Heights rezoning and a smaller development in Pleasantview, each with a significant proportion of units on the ground level with sufficient space and amenities to support families with children. However, I believe that until projects like these, and other smaller land-efficient infill projects like brownstones and stacked townhouses are actually built, most Edmontonians will continue to choose detached homes, large yards and the automobile-dependant lifestyle that accompanies the business-as-usual pattern of development.

So the question is whether this shift toward walkable, mixed-use, medium density, transit-enabled development will occur and, if so, when? In other words: will a market shift occur any time soon? The city, the region, the province, the industry and – ultimately – homebuyers will all shape the answer to these questions.

The trajectory of development may not be entirely within Council’s control, but our challenge for the 10 year life of this plan is to adhere to the best principles embedded within it, such that these next 10 years mark the /transition/ to our vision for that compact city, that efficient city, that vibrant city and that less unsustainable, and hopefully – one day – that sustainable community we envision.

My concern with this plan has always been with the business-as-usual assumptions about growth over the next 30 years.

However, I have a great deal of hope that the shift can occur within the next 10 years – that shift can come with LRT; it can come with a change in our values around the ecological impacts of our lifestyle; it can come with a change in the cost of hydrocarbons and/or the cost of emissions resulting from burning those same hydrocarbons. I just don’t see the business-as-usual assumptions lasting for the 30 years.

Three months ago I called this plan “The Way we Sprawl” but it honestly contains the potential for two outcomes: sprawl is one outcome, yes, but the other possible outcome is a maturity beyond that.

The difference is a question of will.

With diligence in implementation on the part of the city, with innovation from industry, and with the will and cooperation of citizens and homebuyers, this plan can live up to its potential and become known more optimistically as “The Way we Grow Up.”

This attitude does require a measure of faith that our will will be strong, and a measure of faith that change pressures from citizens, from homebuyers, and economic shifts will make change we can respond to resiliently – and not timidly – under this plan, which I will support.

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Posted in 2007-2010 Term, Smarter Planning, Urban Sprawl | 10 Comments »

West LRT Follow Up

Dec
16
2009

I had indicated the other day on this blog that I was hesitant about the proposed Stoney Plain Road LRT alignment, at least the part between 156 St and 121 Street. I had a number of questions, most of which were addressed in one of the most cogent presentations I’ve ever seen from city staff.

The video recording is not posted yet on the city website, but the PDF of their presentation is downloadable at this link.

Some of the potential upsides of 107 Ave that I had been interested in exploring were discussed, and the main one was the cost difference. On closer examination, the spread between SPR and 107 Ave was not $200-300 million, it’s more like $30 million cheaper to build 107 Ave, but it would be more expensive to operate because it’s further and would require more Light Rail Vehicles.

WLRT alternative route cost comparison

Admittedly, there is an interpretation of the slide above that would lead one right back to 87 Ave route, but the slide below is the best visual representation of what’s wrong with 87 Ave from an urban point of view.

WLRT existing land use intensity

I do think there’s still a lot at risk with this choice, but I think that Council is aware of those risks and will work to mitigate them. I was reminded of an earlier amendment I proposed to our Transportation Master Plan that established a policy of ‘precursor’ premium bus service on planned LRT routes, which if followed through on will be positive for SPR.

So after yesterday’s debate, I felt able to support the bylaw. Much of the concerns citizens and councillors still have will be dealt with at the next phases of more detailed design and engineering (like snow removal, managing the construction disruption, etc.). Many people would like to see that level of detail before a route is settled on by council, but it’s very expensive and, therefore, impractical to do this for all the alternatives. So now we can study SPR and if a fatal flaw emerges in that analysis Council and the public will know about it.

Incidentally, the bylaw also included the plan for Downtown to Millwoods and a small change to the NAIT line to shift the tracks onto the airport lands instead of running up 106 Street, which is a big step toward airport redevelopment.

My main message yesterday is speaking to the bylaw: now we have a plan to show Ottawa and the province, and we can press the question of whether they will invest in Edmonton or not. Our citizens want LRT, but it won’t get built without at least one more order of government in the mix.

So who’s in?

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Posted in 2007-2010 Term, Smarter Planning, Transit | 15 Comments »

The Way we Grow/Sprawl

Nov
14
2009

townhomes modern urban - istock

Good urban form, by way of example.

I caused a bit of a stir on Thursday at Council by raising some concerns about the city’s proposed development plan ‘The Way we Grow’. I rather flippantly suggested we could call it ‘The Way we Sprawl.’

Scott McKeen wrote about the plan in Friday’s Journal and his critique is similar to mine. In spite of what he said, there are some very positive things in this plan, so I don’t want to write it off completely. I’ll come back to that.

First, though, the part of the plan I spoke against and voted against yesterday is the part where our expectations for relative share of growth are set out, which is section 2.1.1.2, on page 13, which reads:

Encourage a greater percentage 25% of city-wide housing unit growth to locate in the Downtown and mature neighbourhoods (see Map 3: Mature Neighbourhood Overlay) and around premium transit locations where infrastructure capacity supports redevelopment.

The underlying assumption of the plan is that the city will grow by 400,000 people in the next 30 years. This means 75% of the units will be outside of the core and away from ‘premium transit’ (i.e. LRT or the very best bus service). Furthermore, since we’re assuming that households occupying infill and intensification units have fewer members, 25% of units in the core only comes to 20% of the people (which has been our experience, since families with children still largely flock to the suburbs, vs. the singles and empty nesters who may pick smaller units with better locations). On other words, our plan presumes that 320,000 people will locate on the periphery, near or beyond Anthony Henday Drive.

I find this tough to swallow.

But here’s the plan’s qualifying statement in the plan about how fast we can ‘turn the ship’ from our suburban character to urban, from page 12:

Changing our current growth pattern will take time.  Edmonton’s mature neighbourhoods received 18% of the city’s growth in housing units in 2007; despite this unit growth, the population in these mature areas has declined in recent years.  Between 2005 and 2008, mature neighbourhoods declined in population by 1%.  All new population growth during this time occurred in other areas of the city, primarily in our developing communities.  The MDP proposes a new direction for growth and it will take time to effect change.  The Plan is a long term strategy and will require incremental decisions that support our commitment to saying “yes” to the things we want and need and “no” to the things that do not advance our City Vision and goals.

I think we need to ‘turn the ship’ faster and push for a bigger share of growth to be urban, rather than suburban, over the 30 years of the plan. Easier said then done, yes, but let’s ask why would it be desirable to urbanize at least as much as we suburbanize?

  • A less efficient city will cost more to serve well, or will end up with declining services. We know these peripheral neighbourhoods will be very expensive to deliver services to and maintain infrastructure for; things like fire protection, waste collection, and transit will be more costly to deliver to further suburbia than if we densify the exiting footprint properly. This is intuitive, but the city is also studying this. Wish we had the results.
  • Peripheral neighbourhoods, no matter how walkable or attractive, will lock in automobile dependancy for the vast majority of their residents. There is well-documented public health evidence that automobile dependance leads to higher rates of obesity as well as impacts to emotional well-being. Our council-stated goal to see a shift from car use to other modes of transportation (principally transit, walking and cycling) stands in jeopardy. This means more traffic, more delay, more private and public expense on cars and infrastructure.
  • Plus there’s no way we achieve community-wide reductions in greenhouse gasses with rising distances travelled by car and worsening downstream gridlock.

In other words, for fiscal, social and environmental reasons, there is a strong case against conceding to so much peripheral development. Again, I’m not calling for a halt to it, since I don’t see how we could accomplish that under current legislation. I’m calling for greater urbanization within today’s footprint. We’re told that market demand’s not there, that demand is for the suburbs, and that we can’t fight that. But I think we have to work to make urban living more family-friendly – which we’re beginning to do – and we need to make it competitive in terms of affordability. This is work worth doing, even if it’s hard. It doesn’t mean cramming families into highrises, it means more duplexes where there are bungalows, nice townhomes where there are underused lands, and family-oriented units on the ground floor of some taller buildings. That, by the way, is city building.

I should note that there is much to like in the plan: the parts that deal with integrating transit and land planning in established areas are positive (section 2.3); the new provisions in chapter 9 about Urban Agriculture and Food are very encouraging; and the design principles for planning in established and new areas are sound in my view (e.g. chapter 3).

The one outstanding issue we’ll grapple with next time Council deals with the plan in February is density targets for new development. These are mandated under the Capital Region Land Use Plan, but these were not going to be discussed in our MDP. At my urging, they will be. Targets were a source of significant debate in Calgary’s recent plan, and were watered down before final passage. If we can achieve sufficient thresholds of density in the new areas then some of the inefficiencies and negative impacts of this growth can be reduced.

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Posted in 2007-2010 Term, Smarter Planning, Urban Sprawl | 20 Comments »

Selling EPCOR water or wires would come to Council

Oct
01
2009

A report arrived at Council today on how any future decisions would be made regarding the sale or transfer of major assets still in EPCOR that Edmontonians depend on. The report responded to a motion I put forward in the summer asking for this information. [Download the report here.]

[Clarification added Oct 3: Just to be clear, I asked these questions as a hypothetical. There are no proposals that I'm aware of to sell EPCOR as a whole or any part of the Water, Wastewater or Electricity Distribution & Transmission assets in Edmonton. The Capital Power spin-off was it.]

In a nutshell, the city regulates water and wastewater, and as regulator approval would be required if ownership of the potable water plants, the water pipes, or the wastewater plant were proposed to change. This decision would come to a council meeting.

Furthermore, even though Electricity distribution is regulated by the province, there is a franchise agreement in place for the use of right of way for power lines and any change to this agreement would also have to come to council for approval. Electricity transmission assets (high voltage) are treated differently in terms of regulation and other legalities, so the sale of such might not come to a Council meeting.

The report indicates that EPCOR would also need to seek approval from its shareholder (also the City), which it normally would do at a closed meeting, to sell any major assets.

So what we’ve learned is that the process might start behind closed doors between company and shareholder, but in the case of the utilities that people have expressed concern to me about losing (namely, water, wastewater and power distribution) there would be a Council debate on the matter – one would hope that this would not occur in private.

Councillor Henderson proposed a motion aimed at changing some of the governing documents to explicitly require that there be a Council meeting to consider any proposed sale of major assets in Edmonton, but it was defeated 7 to 5. I supported his motion.

In fairness, there was disagreement among councillors about the practical realities of owning a competitive business, and how this conflicts with our desire for transparency as elected officials. In this instance I leaned toward transparency going forward, having learned a valuable lesson about what a relative lack of transparency in the Capital Power decision process led to in terms of confusion and angst among the public.

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Posted in 2007-2010 Term, EPCOR, Taxation | 4 Comments »

EPCOR: Risk and the Best Interests of the City

Jul
20
2009

This post is a follow up to a previous post on the decision to spin off the power generating wing of EPCOR as the new Capital Power Corporation, and to authorize the sale of shares in that new company to the market. The proceeds of this sale of shares will be used by EPCOR to build the water, wastewater and electricity distribution and transmission businesses.

It’s now possible for me to say more about the rationale for the decision since the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of shares is complete. During that 90-day period it was critical that the City not act as a ‘promoter’ of the IPO, so we couldn’t talk plainly about the risks and strategic assumptions. Remaining neutral on the promotion of the IPO was part of the motivation for taking the decision in private – becoming a promoter has legal risk attached to it, and the City could be an attractive target for shareholder litigation.

It has been argued by critics of the decision that the dividend (which is forecast by the city to be $133 million this year) will fall because of this sale. This argument makes an assumption that the dividend would have continued to grow steadily as it has for many years, or at least remain constant. This should not be assumed. The first bit of fine print on every risk-bearing investment is ‘past performance does not guarantee future results’.

There is also regulatory risk to consider: if and when stronger environmental regulations & pollution pricing come to bear on high emissions industries, the power business could change significantly – and the kinds of strong, growing returns EPCOR has seen from that line of business could at the very least become more volatile, which would not be in the city’s interest.[I've quoted the relevant paragraphs from the prospectus below.]

The investment risk is lower in the water, wastewater and electricity distribution and transmission businesses, all of which are regulated and provide a stable return. Truthfully, EPCOR was becoming generating-heavy and as an investment, EPCOR needed to be rebalanced toward lower risk. This decision, I think, was in the best interests of the city from a risk management perspective.

I believe the main concern, however, is the way in which the decision was made. The legality of the process in the Capital Power decision is now before the courts. In ruling on an application for interim injunction to stop the IPO, Justice Hawco’s of the Court of Queen’s Bench made some widely reported remarks to the effect that some of the reasons for privacy displayed ‘a lack of faith in the intelligence or common sense of the citizens’, (as reported, p11-12 of the ruling) but he also ruled that there did appear to be “valid concerns by EPCOR about going public before the prospectus was filed.” Justice Hawco also indicated, and this also was not widely reported, that “The sale of the electrical business of the city as managed by EPCOR could have been more transparent, but the sale was made in the best interests of EPCOR and the best interests of the citizens of Edmonton.” [I've uploaded a PDF of the full ruling here: CQB decision Pidruchney vs. COE et al.] I understand this litigation is continuing.

I am on record saying that that I reluctantly supported taking the decision in private. I am also bringing a motion to Council on the 22nd of July designed to ensure that any decision to sell any former city-owned assets, or EPCOR asset that directly serves Edmontonians (i.e. the water and wastewater plants, water pipes and electrical distribution and transmission infrastructure) cannot be sold using the same process. I’ve been accused of inconsistency in pushing for this but supporting, albeit reluctantly, the behind-closed-doors process for the Capital Power decision. However, the complications I described in my previous post do not apply with the regulated parts of EPCOR. I hope my motion will pass and provide reassurance that these municipal services will remain with EPCOR.

The Capital Power prospectus includes the following about environmental risks:

“Many of the Company’s operations are subject to extensive environmental laws, regulations and guidelines relating to the generation and transmission of electricity, pollution and protection of the environment, health and safety, GHG and other air emissions, water usage, wastewater discharges, hazardous material handling, storage, treatment and disposal of waste and other materials and remediation of sites and land-use responsibility. These regulations can impose liability for costs to investigate and remediate contamination without regard to fault and under certain circumstances, liability may be joint and several resulting in one contributing party being held responsible for the entire obligation.

“On April 29, 2009, the Canadian Environment Minister announced in a media interview that the Canadian Federal Government is planning new climate change regulations aimed at coal-fired power in Canada’s electricity sector. The regulations would purportedly require all newly constructed coal generation plants to use technology to capture GHG and inject it underground for permanent storage. Compliance with this and other known and unknown environmental regulations may require material capital and operating expenditures and failure to comply with such regulations could result in fines, penalties or the forced curtailment of operations. Further, there can be no assurances that compliance with and/or changes to environmental regulations will not materially adversely impact the Company’s business, prospects, financial conditions, operations or cash flow.

“The Company’s business is a significant emitter of CO2, NOx, SO2 and mercury and is required to comply with all licenses and permits and existing and emerging federal, provincial and state requirements, including programs to reduce or offset GHG emissions.

“EPLP’s wood waste plants may also be subject to SO2 and mercury reduction requirements within the next five to seven years. In addition, the decreased availability in waste heat used by EPLP’s Ontario plants may lead to increased emissions and decreased allowances being allocated with respect to these facilities. There are a number of uncertainties associated with the estimated cost of compliance with these existing and emerging requirements. It is not yet clear as to the form in which the new carbon and GHG regulations will be implemented or whether such regulations, when implemented, will reflect the proposed regulatory aims. In addition, the Company is not able to determine the extent to which future compliance costs will be recoverable from customers or whether such costs may be shared among emitters, customers and stakeholders. Other unknown factors include the future composition of the Company’s generation assets, the future production of electricity from the Company’s generation assets, the extent and timing of the development of carbon offset markets, whether economically feasible emission-reducing technology will emerge, the market price for carbon offset credits and other measures that the Company might undertake to reduce its emissions. Compliance with new regulatory requirements may require EPLP to incur significant capital expenditures and/or additional operating expenses.”

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Posted in 2007-2010 Term, EPCOR, Environment | 2 Comments »

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