BDAC Meeting 15th March

I won't bore you with all the procedural stuff that took up the majority
of last nights meeting of the Bronte District Advisory Committee.

There were a couple of bits of interesting tattle-tale though, there was
some disagreement between Councilor Ralph Robinson and the long term
planning manager about the ability of this committee to discuss and
comment on individual planning specifics. ex-Councillor Mike Lansdowne
stepped in as a member of the public watching to help the committee try
to clarify the position. The position was not clarified, and minutes
from council meetings have been requested to try to identify the bounds
of the mandate of the committee.

The English translation of this is that at present, this committee has
no oversight on individual plans brought before council, even though
members of the committee believe the decision was made some 3 years ago
to the contrary. Which for us means that in respect to the woodlot
development, they are pretty hamstrung, and will be ineffective as a
body to assist us. Individually I believe there were many sympathisers
with our cause, but until clarification can be gained from the staff in
the council who hold the minutes of the meetings (presumably the town
Clerk), as a committee they have no impact. Unless.......

I understood from what I gleaned at the meeting was that one of the
mandates of the committee is to advise council on matters of policy.
Therefore I believe that if it can be shown that any specific
development goes against any policies accepted, and passed by the Town
Council (such as the official plan and all it's component parts) then
the committee is mandated to advise the council on these policies, and
thereby get around this blockage. Details of any inconsistencies need
to be sent to the committee at least two weeks prior to the next
meeting, these meetings are held at the town hall on the third Thursday
of every month.

Another interesting point is that the next planning & development
meeting was given as April 11th at 7p.m. Actually, if you check on the
Council website (http://www.oakville.ca/pdca07mar.htm) the next meeting
for planning approval is to take place on March 19th.

This meeting affect the lakeshore woods development as it is to discuss
the approval of the 162 house development just north of Shell Park, and
the spending of $1,350,000 of taxpayers money by the housing developer
of giving us some soccer pitches. Interestingly expensive grass and
fencing there I feel.

We have a contact on the committee who has been given the remit to be
the liaison point with local associations and groups who might have a
feed into this meeting. He is Sundeep Khosla

Anyway the last point on last nights meeting was that Sundeep presented
the Lakeshore Woods Newsletter that was accepted by the meeting as an
information item. He was also supposed to present the "Proposed
Townhouse Complex - Lakeshore Woods" as an information item, but
actually didn't have any information, and members of the public were
barred from speaking on information items by a second hand edict from
the Town Clerk which seemed to go against a point in the Rules for
Procedure for Committee which were again presented to this committee by
the same member of staff who passed on the edict. Go Figure!