By David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen Blog, February 12, 2014
Responding to Monday’s pretty fierce attack on the city’s own urban planning department by Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes, planning committee chairman Peter Hume says they’re, uh, already thinking of doing the main thing she says she wants.
Holmes’s criticism was big on rhetoric (“The Branch provides support to any application with little-to-no recognition or consideration of the neighbourhood wants or needs”) but when you boil it right down to its crystalline essence, Holmes’s demand is for residents and their community associations to be involved in the planning-approvals process earlier, so that the first chance they get to comment isn’t after an application has already come in, by which time, Holmes argues, it’s tacitly already approved by the city’s planning department, with all the rest of the process — including a planning committee and council vote that constitute the real official approval — just a formality.