A Morinville councillor says the town should get rid of its municipal planning commission to cut back on red tape.
Morinville council voted unanimously last Oct. 8 in support of a move by Coun. Sarah Hall to have administration prepare a report to eliminate the town’s municipal planning commission (MPC) and possibly replace it with an administrative review committee.
The move was prompted in part by a letter received by council from a Morinville taxpayer that said town administration had been unhelpful with his development application and that he was “disgusted” with the town’s approach to new business development.
Hall said the letter writer’s issue had been resolved at a recent MPC meeting.
Town chief administrative officer Stephen Labonne took issue with the writer’s remarks, saying the town’s staff took their job seriously and that town development planner Tyler McNab (who would have handled the writer’s application) regularly walked people through development applications and would never have told an applicant to simply “check bylaws” as alleged.
“I would put their work and our timelines up against (those of) anybody in the Edmonton region ... because I know our timelines and our processes are nowhere near as long as those of the region,” Labonne said.
Red tape or safety net?
The MPC is a committee of two councillors and three members of the public that meets once a month to rule on development applications that somehow violate the town’s land use bylaw, said Hall in an interview – say, by having extra-tall fences or wider driveways.
Hall, who sits on the MCP, said she had been thinking about eliminating the committee since last spring after talking with places such as Stony Plain that had done away with such groups. She had not discussed the matter in detail with committee members.
“When we talk in Morinville about making things easier for our businesses, I think the MPC just gets in the way,” Hall said.
The MPC meets once every 30 days and it takes 21 days for a development to be approved following a decision at a meeting, Hall said. That means a business might have to wait 51 days to open its doors if it needs the MPC’s approval for a variance. She recalled one case last February where a woman had to wait 60 days for the MPC’s decision because the committee asked for what turned out to be irrelevant information.
“It was an extremely long waiting period and it felt like we got in the way.”
While some jurisdictions leave development decisions up to planning officers, Hall proposed replacing Morinville’s MPC with a panel drawn from town administrators who would have the expertise needed to understand the impact of any proposed land-use bylaw variance.
“It just puts the decision in the hands of the experts,” she said in council, pitching this change as a way to cut red tape.
Councillors Nicole Boutestein and Stephen Dafoe supported the idea, saying many of the matters that go before MPC could easily be handled by administration. Mayor Barry Turner said the MPC’s oversight was sometimes necessary, but noted the process could add weeks or months to an application process.
In an interview, MPC chair Jayson Wood disagreed with council’s characterization of the committee as “red tape,” saying it is actually an accountability and engagement measure that gives citizens a say in how the town is run.
“This is our community,” he said, and town taxpayers know what sorts of developments they want to see in it.
Wood said if council is really interested in cutting red tape, it should revise the outdated land use bylaw rules that keep pushing developers to the MPC to seek variances.
“If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” he said.
