Taking the
The much-maligned Ontario
Municipal Board has its
detractors but many
in-house lawyers who appear
before it say it works. Does
it need to be revamped?
politics
out
of
planning
T
BY Jim Middlemiss
here's a growing public perception that cities always lose
to developers in appeals at the Ontario Municipal Board,
but don't tell that to Brendan O'Callaghan, a lawyer with
the City of Toronto. "I win over 80 per cent of my hearings," says O'Callaghan, who's usually involved in 20 to 25
hearings a year. "I'm pretty happy with the treatment I get at the board."
He says the public perception that
Toronto gets the short end of the stick
at OMB is simply wrong. O'Callaghan,
whose practice is almost exclusively before the OMB and covers development
applications and expropriations, recently
defeated RioCan, a retail real estate trust,
in its efforts to build a large retail format
store in the Dundas and Bathurst area of
Toronto, the heart of west end downtown.
There have been a number of other cases where Toronto city planning prevailed
over developers.
Developers were beat back in their
attempts to build big box retail on
Toronto port lands. An attempt by Top
of the Tree Developments Inc. to build a
25-storey tower on the northwest quadrant at Yonge and Eglinton, a major transit hub and an area already dotted with
skyscrapers, failed because parts of the
land needed for the project are designated
neighbourhood. The OMB ruled it wasn't
in the public interest or the principles of
good planning to change that.
Nonetheless, municipalities do take
their lumps at the OMB. In a bid to stop
urban sprawl, Waterloo Regional Council proposed opening up only 197 acres
