Last night I attended a County public consultation about their draft Official Plan update, perhaps one of the most esoteric and boring events I can imagine…and it was packed. I was a bit late for the first presentation, and had to wait in the hallway; there wasn’t even anywhere to stand in the room. And the tone of the meeting was tense, to say the least.
I’m quite excited that there was that much attention on the draft Official Plan, which will eventually turn into a fundamental document that will shape every community in Northumberland over the next thirty years. And I understand why people are concerned: this is a big step in the journey of major change, and so any ambiguity or confusion about it naturally leaves people on edge. And the possibility of reducing available agricultural land is deeply concerning, and something I’ve been investigating a lot recently myself.
So here’s a quick rundown of what’s being proposed, as well as the procedure moving forward.
The Proposed Plan
If you get a chance to peruse the maps (see the Documents tab on the right hand side of this page) you’ll see that most of the changes are long, narrow strips, or triangles. This is because almost all of the changes are “housekeeping”, which is to say that the existing Official Plan maps have boundaries that don’t line up with property boundaries perfectly. The official line between a rural and urban area shouldn’t run through the middle of someone’s property, so it’s been adjusted. There are only four major changes for all of Northumberland.
Of the major changes, two are in Port Hope: an expansion of the urban boundary to the west of the town to add enough urban area to serve over 5,000 new residents over the next few decades; and a smaller expansion to the north of the 401 to add more “employment lands”, expected to be largely industrial.
Two more are in Grafton, where land owners who wanted to develop their land into residential lots have asked Alnwick-Haldimand to have those lands added to the settlement boundary. The township agreed, and proposed those amendments to the County. It would add a new neighbourhood on either side of Grafton. Those neighbourhoods are likely to be low-density housing, because Grafton doesn’t have a wastewater system. Every home in Grafton needs to have a septic system, which needs to be spaced out from every other septic system.
Finally, there are some minor changes, including in Codrington. While the study done to assess expected growth in our communities indicated that we didn’t need to add any land to the urban area in order to facilitate all of the expected growth over the next few decades, there was a proposed expansion of the settlement area in Codrington at the request of a landowner:
It is my understanding that the land that was requested to be added to the settlement area was once a gravel pit that has since been exhausted. There are two things to note here: first, the Provincial Policy Statement allows for small changes to settlement area boundaries for the purposes of “rounding out” a settlement area – which is to say, a change like this is less about adding area to the settlement as much as it is filling out the corners of the existing settlement area. Codrington’s settlement area was an irregular t-shape, and now it will be more of a rectangular shape. This addition is about 6 hectares, which is expected to facilitate about 19 single family dwellings. Like Grafton, there is no wastewater system in Codrington, so there’s no real opportunity for higher density development.
The second thing to note here is that there was some land in the existing settlement area that was landlocked: there was no road going through it. By adding this land to the settlement area, it allows that landowner to extend Aranda Way to the south, and then to the west, to access that landlocked area. This is a more efficient use of land, and doesn’t impact agricultural land. The more we develop non-agricultural and non-sensitive land, the more we can preserve agricultural and sensitive land. In this case, the next 20 or so households that are added to rural Brighton will be in a neighbourhood in walking distance to the Codrington Community Centre, rather than in lots that are carved off of existing farms. Anything we can do to preserve that farmland is a good thing.
The Process Moving Forward
This Official Plan amendment process has already been under way for several years; the consultants have been working on it in some form or another since 2020. There are still a few public consultation meetings, where feedback can be incorporated before a final draft is presented to lower-tier councils like ours. Once approved, it goes to the province for their approval. Then, and this is the important part, lower-tier municipalities get to update our own Official Plans.
Our Official Plan (OP) needs to conform to the County’s Official Plan, which needs to conform to the provincial legislation and regulations. The province has been changing their rules a lot lately, which has caused this process to drag out a bit. But we have a lot of good changes we want to make to our own OP, changes that would embed more sustainability, accessibility, and affordability into Brighton’s development as a community, so I’m eager to get on with it!
One of the concerns raised last night by a Port Hope resident carried with it the assumption that any new additions to the urban area will just be an expansion of the common low-density, single-family neighbourhoods we’ve come to expect. I’ve talked here before about how expensive sprawl is for a community: if we keep building out one low-density subdivision at a time, housing will never get more affordable, municipalities will go bankrupt, and our small town will look more like the endless car-dependent suburbia of the GTA. Thankfully, planning doesn’t have to look like that: the lower-tier Official Plans can (and will) require more mixed-density, mixed-use developments that combine residential and commercial and include the entire range of housing types from single family right up to apartment buildings. That kind of diversity creates more vibrant and walkable neighbourhoods, with a higher density that allows local businesses to thrive.
So while the proposed amendments to the County OP have very little impact on Brighton, getting it done will allow us to move forward with our own changes, which I expect to be one of the most impactful things our council will accomplish in this term.
What do you think about how land in Brighton is designated? Would you like to see more action to preserve farmland? I’ll be writing more about that soon, send me your questions!