4386 Rideau Valley Drive - Info Session Transcript
4386 Rideau Valley Drive – Virtual Information Session, Aug. 29 @ 6 pm
Note: this transcript has been edited for clarity, length and repetition, and all identifying names and addresses have been removed to ensure the privacy of attendees.
The Presentation
I'll start by introducing our team. I'm James Ireland. I'm a planner with Novatech. Also here is Greg Winters, who is my boss, and another planner at Novatech. And we've got Sam who's a civil engineer at Novatech. And Brad Bivet, who is a transportation engineer at Novatech. And from Uniform, the developer, there's Ryan McDougall and Emily Myers.
I'll start with my presentation. It's not long. We will leave lots of time for questions.
I'm sure all of you know exactly where the lands that we're talking about are. But just to make sure, the corner of Bankfield Road and Rideau Valley Drive, known as a Stinson Farmland, bounded by those two roads and then the Wilson Cowan Drain and Mud Creek. There are additional lands to the North owned by Uniform, but they're not part of this proposal.
The first thing to cover off is the fact that this plan might look familiar to some of you, but slightly different. Since we made the application to the City, the City provided first round comments, so technical review comments from all of their departments, parks, engineering, planning, and also some comments from residents.
Based on those comments, Uniform decided to make some changes to the plan. The most obvious one is the park has been relocated. You might recall it was down near Bankfield Road. It's now been moved to a more central location in the development. It's now proposed to be located here.
You might have also remembered a park on the Rideau River. That's not a park anymore. It's open space. And that's more of a technical thing really from the City and park staff who have very specific requirements for parks. They're particularly keen on them being generally flat and useful for sporting or activities like that.
They didn't want a park on the river is the bottom line. So, we've put all our park in the development in a more traditional suburban park. Another couple of little things we changed, we moved this intersection into the development a little bit to meet traffic requirements, but essentially, they're the main changes.
This plan is colour-coded, so if you can read it, it's quite easy to see that you've got single detached being yellow, then there's a few semi-detached houses in there and town homes, and obviously the park and the open space.
Also shown on this plan are the sidewalks that we propose, basically a sidewalk on one side of every street. And then the connection down to the intersection of Bankfield and Rideau Valley Drive, the corridor along Mud Creek. And then Wilson Cowan Drain is obviously not developable, so we are leaving it, based on a setback decided by the geotechnical report.
So obviously the safe distance back from the watercourse, and then that's going to remain as open space to be rewilded.
This is the same plan, just not as colorful. It's a draft plan, which is a more technical document showing literally how the subdivision is going to take place. But it's based on that previous plan I showed you and we just included some plans. And these are from the application. These are just some of the types of units that Uniform build -- a very high-quality builder. These are some of the detached units. And then that's an example of the townhouse blocks. We'll see there's four townhouses there.
This is quite a large development, 148 units in the village of Manotick. But this site was always intended for residential development. In fact, it's in the Manotick secondary plan as a medium density development. I say medium density, I mean it's really looking for townhouses and singles, and it's been included in the village for some time now and was included as part of a consultation with residents at the time.
Uniform has obviously bought this land, and they are developing it very much in line with City and Provincial policies. That's it for me. I’d be happy to answer questions.
Questions & Answers
Question: What is stopping the residents from dumping garbage, yard waste, and tree limbs in the back channel by the river?
Answer: This block at the back you're talking about will be given to the City as open space. They certainly don't have the right to dump stuff there. It's not their land. It'll have to be an enforcement issue for the City.
Question: We believe with the amount of development that is proposed and being considered now, and others that's in the pipeline, that there should be a pause to that development while the impacts of all of these proposals is investigated. We're aware of the provisions of the secondary plan, the requirements for housing, and the attractiveness of Manotick for development. We feel that kicking the can down the road with regards to the heavy truck traffic, with regards to the impact on potential impact on groundwater and surface water, we feel that those things need to be looked at, within the context of all of the development proposals that are in the pipeline now, or could be in the future. Those impacts should be known. And remediation or amelioration of those impacts be determined before further development is approved, including this particular development. The question is, is it possible that given all of the pressures in the village with respect to development, that there be a pause until the impacts, and particularly the investigation of the termination of the heavy truck route on Bridge Street, that those be investigated, determined, and solutions known before further development proceeds?
Answer: We did prepare a traffic impact assessment in accordance with the City's guidelines. Within that report, we did account for background development, and traffic from other studies or developments that are currently in the queue. Anything that the City has on file for applications within the area. So, we have captured background traffic from other area developments. With respect to our development, we're expecting about a 2-3% increase compared to the background traffic volumes within the study area. This increase in traffic is anticipated to have marginal impacts compared to the current operations within the study area. These are all arterial roads and I'm sure you're aware of the development charges bylaw and how arterial intersections are generally function as citywide infrastructure. Any of the offsite improvements that these intersections are generally constructed and funded by the City's development charges. The City is updating their transportation master plan currently, which will review truck traffic through Manotick and any of the potential projects that are required for any of the areas within the city. The city is advancing that, and that is expected to be completed in 2024.
Question: What is the background, and what studies are being completed for this development?
Answer: What I can assure the public on the call today and to the counselor is that the city has a very extensive process for review of development applications. Not only do they look at individual applications as they're submitted through a rigorous test, but they actually look at a lot of these applications in combination with each other. For instance, my colleague, Sam is doing the civil engineering on this site. He's having to address comments from the city of Ottawa through his technical studies that addresses the cumulative servicing constraints in the village, how we're accommodating this development, and to show that it's in line with the servicing requirements, and it can be adequately serviced in a reasonable amount of time.
Just like my colleague Brad explained, a good portion of his traffic impact assessment study also addresses cumulative impacts of traffics on the surrounding networks. Not all of those solutions are stuff that are required to be addressed by the development itself. As Brad indicated, some of these things are flagged for the City of Ottawa so that they can be taken into consideration through the infrastructure master plan, whether it through either the transportation master plan, development charges and such. There's a very extensive set of criteria and study requirements that we have to satisfy before we get approval. But asking for one development to be held up, while we compound and look at all these problems again through some other lens, is just going hold up housing at this point in time. And how the city council has declared a housing emergency. We are trying to build more houses, so that's what we're fulfilling today. We have a policy that's supportive of this area to be developed in the secondary plan, and we believe that our plans and our supporting materials all support the application.
In terms of site servicing, I'll answer it in two ways. The first one is actual servicing of the subdivisions is going be done through municipal water and municipal sewer. That's connections to the existing water main on Rideau Valley Drive, Manotick Main Street, and also the same to the sanitary sewer that's directed towards the Manotick pumping station just to the northeast corner of the site. Stormwater management, the outlet for the site is going to be the Wilson Cowan Drain and Mud Creek. They're both legal outlets under the Drainage Act that is where the pre-development flows of the subdivision always had been directed to. We're very close to the Rideau River, so we don't really need to do any quantity control. There's no real benefit of it. We do have to, however, provide quality control, and we're doing that using a Vortechs unit to try to remove sediments from the discharge of the proposed urbanization of the roads prior to discharge into Mud Creek and the Wilson Cowan Drain. These are standard practices that the City and the provincial legislation requires. And as far as impact to existing groundwater, we do have a study that was a groundwater impact study that was provided as part of the application, which was done by Patterson Group.
We don't have them on the call, but I can speak to it. We do look at the depth of servicing that we would be going through the subdivision and any impacts on any groundwater taking or pumping during construction activities. And typically, they do provide recommendation that is now a standard practice within the city to have some baseline testing within a certain buffer zone of the actual site where groundwater can be impacted. That's a fairly standard practice. We did something similar in the South Manotick area as well.
Question: It used to be a requirement of the Planning Act that a meeting such as this would take place, but that's no longer the case. What other changes are we looking at in terms of this application and timelines?
Answer: There is a lot of stuff that's changing right now for this application. Overall, the applications were submitted before some other changes in the Planning Act. Without getting into the weeds of the details, it's essentially processed like every other application at the City of Ottawa. There's a subdivision application, it goes out on circulation, and we receive comments on the draft plan.
We go back and forth with the City of Ottawa to resolve the technical requirements of those. Once resolved, it'll be sent to City staff to basically set up a set of conditions. We may end up with typically 120 or so odd standard and site-specific conditions that we have to address before the development can be registered and the lots be constructed for housing on it.
We typically find these draft plan approval processes run anywhere from eight months to a year in the process. It's all conceptual at this point in time, so everything's showing how we overall can service the development, how we overall can handle the traffic on it. The conditions of the development once it's been approved, that we still have to satisfy, get into the technical details.
We will actually design the roads, like there'll be construction-ready drawings for that. And that takes another about eight months to go through that process before the City can issue a commence work for construction. Essentially that's the subdivision process, and right now we're still midway through the draft plan approval process, and we're still hoping to resolve the technical comments with City staff through our next submission and beyond.
Parallel to this, we filed a zoning amendment application because the lands right now are development reserve. They're not recognized for an actual zone. They are designated as residential for medium density residential in the secondary plan. So, there's an obligation on the developer to bring the zoning into conformity with the official plan and the secondary plan for the community.
They do that typically through these development applications. Once we know where the park is going be located, and where the roads are going, the zoning schedule ultimately wraps around some of those elements. You'll actually specifically zone the park, for instance, an open space zone of some sort.
Some of the zone boundaries might change, and follow a centre line of road, for instance. If we move the road, the zoning would've to change. You'll see the zoning runs a little bit quietly behind the scenes until we get through draft plan approval. Once we get into that detailed design and we know for certain that the road is exactly where it's going be, we'll advance that zoning bylaw amendment and bring it forward to planning committee or the Agricultural and Rural Affairs Committee in this case, and to council for adoption of the bylaw.
Then there's a 20-day appeal period still on that process, although at that point in time we're just largely implementing the draft plan that's already been approved. That's essentially the two-step process that we're going through right now.
Question: I've noted that they're looking to widen the street on Bankfield. What impact does that have on Miller Park and Lockmaster? I understand there was supposed to be a path that ran to Miller's Park for everyone from Lockmaster residences to be able to get up to Manotick Main Street. What was noted for future developments? Right now, Lockmaster is sort of landlocked for children crossing. Bankfield is heavily trafficked with trucks and cars. My other question is, if they're putting a sidewalk, are they going to put a barrier there? Because as we may know, it is a 60-kilometre zone, but if anyone actually lives here understands, no one actually travels 60 kilometres an hour on Bankfield. If you're putting a sidewalk there, that's going be a higher risk for children walking on with that amount of traffic. Would they potentially look at putting a guardrail? I noticed that Uniform is putting a sound barrier on the side of the property facing Bankfield. Would the City also look at putting a sound barrier across Miller's Park as well?
Answer: Would the City put a sound barrier up? I'll take that away and follow up with you. The road widening you're talking about, and that is shown on the plan, is something the City requires that the street be widened to that width. We're not proposing it throughout our development. Nothing's going to really change, especially in front of Millers Point Park. That is, nothing changes there until the City decides to rebuild or widen Bankfield Road, that's when you'd notice a difference. But this application is not changing anything on that section of the street. There won't be a pathway. So, there won't be a need for a barrier. I guess that answers that second part of the question, the safety question.
On the first revision, they were showing a sidewalk that was going all the way down connecting this subdivision with a path to Millers Park. That has been removed. The intent of that was to connect the old location of the park. We had to, because it was going be so close to Millers Point Park, it made sense to connect it with a pathway. But now that we've moved the park to the other side of the subdivision, we didn't see a need for that pathway. And it's more about connecting the new park location with the surrounding neighborhood.
Question: Is there really is no way for people to connect to the rest of the village?
Answer: The first part about road widening. That road widening that exists now will only ever be used if the City rebuilds Rideau Valley Drive. Same kind of thing there. As far as the pedestrian connectivity goes on this new plan, the sidewalks connect into this, the new sidewalk on Bankfield as far as going any further, as in further into the village or in any direction. It's really the city’s responsibility to provide those sidewalks.
There is an existing sidewalk, around the northwest corner, which extends a little piece along Bankfield. Our intent would be to extend a pedestrian pathway beyond that and tie into that existing sidewalk in that corner, providing connectivity to the intersection, which will provide further connectivity to the south.
There will be still paved shoulders along Bankfield, but it's a separate pathway. It’s a little bit separated from the road to provide a little bit of pedestrian safety. We have connections from within our development, which brings us to the intersection, which provides a formal crossing of Bankfield road so that you can get to the other side and continue down Manotick Main Street.
Question: Then there actually is no big road widening. They're not going to put a turn lane in at the intersection and that pathway is not right up against the road, which is great. It'll be a lot like what they have along Century Road with the Minto development that's in the south end?
Answer: Yes. I can see people really wanting to walk in the village from this development, because it's pretty close. So, the intent is that we provide pedestrian connectivity to the intersection, which has that formalized, signaled crossing to allow them to continue south on the existing sidewalk on the west side. As far as your question about turn lanes, we haven't identified a need for any additional turn lanes on Bankfield itself. We’ve suggested that an additional southbound through lane at the intersection would provide improvements. But as I mentioned previously, these improvements are identified for the City's consideration through the development charges projects.
Question: I support the development of Uniform. We have a nice village in Manotick. Ford has got the building faster fund. How does the City plan on accessing that $1.2 billion from the province? We should have a nice gateway to manage Manotick from both Rideau Valley Road and Bankfield. We should do something nice. We should have sewers all the way to Stonebridge, but I don't understand what the problem is with the City.
Answer: Not to make light of it, but I think if you ask anybody, the problem with the City might be different on who you ask and the answer you get in terms of how we are going to access the funds that have been earmarked by the province. I don't have those specific details, and I know the City's working on how we can comply with the new changes to provincial legislation so we can access that funding. In terms of a gateway to Manotick, a few folks have reached out to me on that. We have several members of the Manotick Village Community Association, and I think someone from the Manotick BIA on the call. That's something that I can take away and speak with those two organizations and those volunteers about. It doesn't have anything to do with the proposal, but I do know that we're starting to receive some comments from residents on beautifying the village as it develops.
Question: I have few comments and a few questions. I can assure you that the neighbors and the people we talk to understand the housing crisis and the need to act on it. This being said, not all needs to be executed blindly or in a rush. It needs to be done in the right way. There are certain key ingredients to major developments. You have here engineers, and senior executives who have led multimillion dollar projects. So, we understand what we are talking about and the dilemma that the City, and the province is facing. But it needs to be done the right way. It needs to be done responsibly.
A large majority of us do not understand what is the big plan for Manotick? This is a huge project. We're talking about 147 units. What is the holistic plan and the strategy to make it a success? I think we need an independent impact analysis, which we haven't seen. I think what we've seen is based on this discussion, this study here, that study there.
There is an issue. Yeah. We've done this, we've done that. Which in my mind, apologies if I sound a bit frustrated, but it sounds bit bureaucratic and it's done from the City's perspective. As opposed from the citizen perspective, the resident perspective. We don't understand the game plan and if there is that independent assessment, it needs to be holistic.
Here are a couple of issues. I think there is traffic, we talked about it significantly. The truck issue is a huge one. But there is the water system, huge infrastructure. There is no way anybody can make me believe that there wouldn't be significant impact, nor are they all known.
We don't expect that. But, at a minimum, what's the impact of that infrastructure? What's in the plan? Affordability, housing. Social housing is necessary, but we are concerned that there may be a trend to have some concentration of it in Manotick.
Maybe not. What's the game plan for affordable housing in Manotick and the right dose of it? What's the plan there? Some of our colleague neighbors mentioned safeguarding Manotick Village and its character. I'm unaware of what the plan is on this one. All of which to say, there are fragments here and there.
This is moving too fast. I think they need to pause until this is well understood, communicated and the impacts and the risks. It's not just highlighted, but there is a plan to resolve them with some concrete results because in Manotick we have good community living and we don't want compromise it.
Answer: I know we're trying to organize a meeting following this one so we can discuss a few more of the aspects to the village itself in terms of affordable housing, how the village is going to grow, some of those traffic impacts. I'm happy to address all of those at that meeting. And that way, we just focus our comments specifically on this proposal. I would say though, in terms of the development, given that the whole proposal is going to be fully serviced by city water, sewer, and stormwater. The impacts of those three service areas to the rest of the village should be marginal if there is an impact at all. All of those services are brought in from, I believe, the south side of Barrhaven, piped down the road there. There shouldn't be an impact to the village in terms of servicing, but I fully respect that traffic is the issue. Truck traffic is the hot button issue, and I won't get into it here because we could spend the next three hours just talking about that.
Question: I live at Bankfield and Rideau Valley Drive, across the river. My backyard faces the development. When I moved, I was seeking some peace and less noise. Since I moved in, what I'm hearing is in my backyard, Rideau Valley Drive, the Rideau River. I'm seeing a lot of traffic and noise. I’m happy to have more neighbors and a believer in housing development. What would be the measures for sound barriers? Once we have 150 approximately units built, so roughly 150 more vehicles will be traveling across the road, behind my backyard and disturbing my peace. That is something which I'm requesting at this point: who has the onus? Is it the developers or is that the City to build the sound barriers, because we're going see a lot more traffic.
The second question I have is on the environmental impact. I live on a septic, as well as a groundwater. It takes a lot of resources to filter the hard water we are having from our property. I want to make sure I don't see more impact on the quality of water or the groundwater in case this development does occur. I see my water becomes more and more hard. And not drinkable. Even if I'm using water softener, three-state filter, then a reverse osmosis to make sure me and my family are drinking clean water.
Answer: It's a very beautiful spot, so I can appreciate your question. It's a lovely spot to look over the river. The unfortunate circumstance of what you're living in though is the fact that Rideau Valley Drive does have a significant amount of background traffic. It's not coming from our development, it's coming from elsewhere that's passing through, or other residents that are coming to and from the village in this case, and Rideau Valley Drive at that point rises in elevation. As you know, it comes up to the Bankfield intersection. It's kind of a high point, so unfortunately noise travels in straight lines from noise generating land uses. If you've got traffic, it's just wheels of the traffic. I've got the same problem living in Kanata, that you can hear noise coming off the stormwater pond and water actually reflects noise even worse.
But the issue here is that the noise doesn't come from our development. The City can only ask us to address and mitigate issues that are related specifically to our development application. If it's background costs coming to and from the development, to and from the village. It's nothing that we can really address through our development applications.
What could happen in some circumstances would be that if Rideau Valley Drive were reconstructed, it's an arterial roadway, it's subject to development charges. In the future, it may be reconstructed. That would be a comment that could be foot forward to that process to say, I'm experiencing a lot more noise. You're now widening the road, making it even bigger. Maybe you could mitigate the noise by looking at some noise barriers between myself and my backyard. Obviously not between myself and the river, but something on your side of the river that basically blocks noise, but it's not something that we would address noise study on our development.
It's within single decimals or single points of percentage at this point in time. When you look at the cost of a barrier, the City looks at it through its noise studies and portions the responsibility to the person that's creating the noise. And, in this case, it's coming from the existing roadway, not from our development. If we had been proposing a light manufacturing or industrial facility or something that had shift work or something, then it would be quite reasonable for us to have to mitigate our noise. But in this case, the houses themselves aren't creating the noise, it's the background traffic.
As part of our development application, we're required to submit a groundwater impact study. We hire a professional hydrologist/hydrogeologist. It was Patterson Group that submitted a report to the City of Ottawa to look at the background and to assess whether there was going to be a potential impact in your development in this case.
There are no anticipated impacts to your area specifically. It was more in relation to people that are on septic and well within the immediate vicinity of the development. But again, there's been no indication there's going to be any problems. There's also a standard condition that goes into every development agreement with the City of Ottawa that we continue to monitor the situation and if there is a groundwater impact that happens during construction, there's a process for the developer in the city to get in there to sort it out and mitigate if necessary.
Question: There was a discussion about the new park at block 79, and the existing Millers Point Park. I think the comment was that there's no connection, so there's no safety issue. I completely disagree. People will cross between the parks. There's playground equipment; there's a soccer field. The ability for bicyclists to get from the existing development over towards the back channel should be encouraged. I think that safety issue should be dealt with either via a small pedestrian bridge, bollards on Bankfield or something to make sure that there's a safe connection for the people to get over towards the Rideau Valley Drive area. My question is with respect to the new park that's against the Rideau River. I’m fully supportive of the idea. My question is what sort of access is going to be built in to get down to the river? We witnessed the wonderful utilization at Mahogany, and I'm just wondering if there's going be some sort of access points, be it gravel ramps to launch a kayak. Maybe a simple dock to be able to fish from. Or are you just going to let people create their own pathways down to the river, and the erosion that results from that?
Answer: On the other side of Rideau Valley Drive is the open space. It was considered to be a park in the initial development application that we submitted, but subsequently when we received the comments back, we received the comments back from the City's parks department and they expressed concerns about trying to build an active park in that location next to Rideau Valley Drive for a number of reasons. Primarily, the number one reason is that they have a park and pathway design manual that they have to follow. The Riverfront Park wasn't seen as being a good location for an active park because of its slope down to the river and its proximity to Rideau Valley Drive.
The City said, ‘we're not accepting that as park space’. So, we reconsidered it. We had a meeting with City staff and we've pulled away from that option and we're now showing it as open space. That can be confusing. In this case, that open space is going to be left naturalized and not a park.
We're not proposing any ability to get to that open space at this point in time. We're not encouraging any sidewalks or anything, or even informal pathways. That land will be dedicated to the municipality. In fact, a portion of it may be considered as part of habitat conservation for blandings turtles, which is a species at risk along the Rideau River.
You raised a question as well about the park along Bankfield Road, and we're not making light of any potential concerns about people accessing Bankfield Road or the safety along Bankfield. That's not a question whatsoever.
In fact, the pathway that we're proposing that's going take you from the intersection of Rideau Valley Drive up Bankfield Road to our site, to our main access to our site, and to the internal park. And our development is going be designed such that it's away from Bankfield Road. It's going be separated by a ditch, so it's going be pulled away from the roadway.
We're working through the details with City staff, but that's the intent. We've moved away from the connection over to Miller's Point Park, because of the reconfiguration of our subdivision. We're bringing people to the park within our development.
We're going to have further discussions with City staff, because we acknowledge that people would like to gain access to Miller's Point. But there's also the Development Charges Act, which has limitations on what can be proposed on a specific development. At this time, our proposal doesn't include building a crossing or getting across Mud Creek or the Wilson Cowan drain in any way over to Millers Point Park.
That land will be conveyed to the City of Ottawa. It wouldn't be a part of anything that would be developed as part of this subdivision or prior to the development application, but maybe in the fullness of time something could be explored with City staff.
Question: When would the units be available and when will they be built? And will there be a second phase in the future if Uniform owns more of the land?
Answer: The timing of the project is really a function of many things. Uniform will never launch a project until we've received draft plan approval and we're through our detailed design process with the City and have a commence work order to start servicing the site. It's a little bit hard to estimate when that time will be. It's a moving target, but we hope to be in a position to start selling homes potentially late 2024, and then building sometime in 2025. That's our goals and our plans at this time.
Question: Will the open space at Bankfield/Rideau Valley Drive, where it says road widening, be used to add an additional lane for those turning right up the hill and into the development? Right now, it is at capacity. Also, will there be a controlled intersection at Colony Heights and Bankfield beyond stop signs? Will there be a right turn lane into the proposed development? And will there be anything more than stop signs at that intersection?
Answer: We have reviewed the operations at the proposed access location across from Colony Heights. We did not see a need for signals, based on our analysis, the intersection would operate acceptably under side street stop controlled. We did review turn lane requirements within our traffic report. We didn't identify a need for a right turn lane into our development. However, we did see a need for left turn lanes, eastbound and westbound, left turn lanes. So, an eastbound left into our development, but also, a westbound left onto Colony Heights. We did prepare a functional design of the intersection, which, we do have a slide here. We can quickly share that where we show where we have developed eastbound on the westbound left turn lanes at the intersection.
This was the functional design that we had prepared. As you can see, we've developed left turn lanes, widened on centre along Bankfield to accommodate left turning vehicles without impacting the adjacent through lanes. This is our proposal for the intersection.
Question: What is the plan for through traffic and infrastructure for the current Colony Heights residents? Is there an option of changing it from a throughway, as it is already very busy with no sidewalks?
Answer: This doesn't really impact the proposal directly. That's not something that they would look at. That's something more that I would look at. You can follow up with me directly and we can put you in contact with City staff to speak about that directly. I know there is a process if you were looking to close the road, and I won't go into the whole thing now, but that's something that if you would like, we can look into. There is a community buy-in opportunity, so residents in the area have to consent to something like that. It's a bit of a longer process with some challenges, but happy to follow up offline if that's something that you'd like to pursue.
Question: How will pedestrians get out of the development if they're walking and want to get on the south side of Bankfield at Colony Heights? For example, pushing a button for a pedestrian crossing, or walking across in a pedestrian box painted on the road on Bankfield sounds dangerous with truck traffic.
Answer: My understanding is there's not going to be any of that. No lane markings to facilitate a pedestrian crossing. I believe that's accurate. We can certainly look at how best to get around that. I know right now, likely, the City's plan and certainly what's been built into the development application here is to send folks to the controlled intersection, which is at Rideau Valley, Manotick Main and Bankfield.
Question: Wondering if there is an additional entry point to the new development closer to the pumping station to reduce the existing bank field traffic pressures?
Answer: As I mentioned, we did look at the intersection operations along Bankfield with the one access point, and we did find that it would operate acceptably just with the one access. We did give some consideration to a secondary access on Rideau Valley Drive, however, due to the spatial limitations with the Pumphouse and Mud Creek to the north, and the existing southbound queues along Rideau Valley, which are currently happening today. It's quite extensive in the pm peak, we found that it wasn't appropriate to have that secondary access there. We have given a bit of consideration to emergency vehicles and having secondary access for that reason. The City of Ottawa doesn't have thresholds for when you need to have a secondary access for emergency vehicles. However, we do acknowledge that 150 units we're getting towards that threshold where you should start considering having that secondary access. On some of our original servicing plans, we did show a potential secondary emergency vehicle access off of Rideau Valley, just south of the pumping station. Now, that would be for a six-metre-wide pathway or an asphalt piece with knockdown bollards that would be used for emergency access only. However, that has not been fully fleshed out with City staff as to the operations of it. We do have to discuss that further with them.
Question: Talking about municipal service for water and sewer onto the island, and when is it coming? When is the City going to offer that?
Answer: That's a hot button issue. It depends on who you ask. Some want municipal water and sewer, and some do not. There is a process that the community can undergo. It's called a local improvement charge. There are some capacity issues. I know certainly with sewage in terms of getting it into the city. It can be pumped through Barrhaven into the north part of the city so there are some capacity considerations, but all of that is done at the cost of homeowners. The City doesn't provide that service. That's something that residents would have to determine they wish to access. If all of the conditions and requirements are met, that comes out of the pocket of homeowners. The biggest challenge I've heard is if I'm putting in a new septic system, I'd rather just connect to the sanitary sewer line because the costs are quite comparable. But if your septic system isn't aged, you likely don't want to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to decommission that and then connect to the City servicing.
Question: How were the designs decided upon for the subdivision? With the change in the Planning Act and the different bills that passed through Provincial Parliament, the look of subdivisions is no longer something that I believe the City has the opportunity to comment on.
Answer: We're showing the Barrhaven style homes that we've built just down the road, adjacent to Stonebridge. Ultimately, the slide shown today is showing existing product that Uniform is known for. Arguably a lot of these designs will come forward to this development. We consider them standout designs in the tracked home realm. We work with a local architect, and we try to bring an elevated approach to tracked housing. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who works for Uniform and I defend these designs and consider them stand out within that category.
We've always paid closer attention to design, massing materiality using quality product on our homes. I hope that ultimately, it's a high standard of product that we're bringing. We're a high-quality builder and bring an elevated approach to that product category.
Question: Will these new residents integrate themselves into the village or will they stay off by themselves?
Answer: Certainly, it'd be my hope that if they're moving into the village, they're going take advantage of the amenities there. There's always great demand for homes in Manotick because people want to come and live here. We have a great community. Everyone who lives there enjoys that, and that's something that others want as well. Certainly, it's something that I would hope they would take advantage of considering they're moving to the village.
Question: Is there any additional information that Uniform would be able to share about the additional land they own?
Answer: The land we own actually spans all the way to the city yard building, but currently our application is only for the land that's within the village of Manotick boundary. We do own land that goes beyond the village boundary, but I don't think it'd be fair to call it like an additional phase, because it's currently not in the village of Manotick boundary. We can't develop that land at this time. It's not zoned for development. That's something that would have to be explored in the future.
Question: How many single homes are proposed?
Answer: There are 62 single homes being proposed out of the 148-unit development.
Closing Remarks by Irene Staron, Manotick Village Community Association
First of all, I'd like to thank you very much for organizing this and facilitating it. I'd like to thank everyone from Uniform, from Novatech, everyone who's involved in this project. This is a very, very important project from our community. And, as you can tell, a lot of questions are being asked. A lot of concerns are being raised, so we are watching this very closely. I have been making copious notes on the questions and the answers. I will be sharing this with those members in our community and residents who have not had the opportunity to participate this evening. That information will be shared through our newsletter and through the Village Voice and our local print paper, the Messenger.