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By viennacafe (registered) | Posted July 07, 2013 at 21:02:13
Master Plans, Secondary Plans, Transportation Master Plans, yadda, yadda, yadda. As far as I can tell, they're make work projects for municipal staff and an opportunity to give a few engaged citizens a sense of engagement, but councillors don't read them and senior staff don't back them.
There are few things to induce more rolls of the eyes than hearing staff or politicians reassuring a public audience that B will not surely follow A because "the plan" does not allow it. Sure.
I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point city councillors have become the guarantors of the bets of land speculators. They will undermine taxpayer investments, private investments, prosperity, and possibility, all to ensure some bad, poorly articulated idea without any relationship to any existing reality or future vision comes to fruition.
Oh, they will say there will be consultation and design requirements to match with the existing streetscape. And then, when the public is sated and the construction has begun, the variance applications will begin to flow.
Do activists at some point recognize that these issues that keep returning like a bad case of herpes can't ever be addressed until the badly broken Municipal Act is reformed? Are we satisfied with meaningless processes and rules carved into pudding?
Municipalities are the neglected wards of the Province. The solution lies there.
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