WC137 JulyAug 2024 - Magazine - Page 9
urban development plans must now include measures to
ensure the protection and availability of water resources.
A municipality must also provide measures to mitigate the
harmful and undesirable effects of any part of the municipal
territory that is sparsely vegetated or very impervious.
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Municipal regulations
At the local level, municipalities are also active players in
addressing the protection of water and its use through the
adoption of regulations. For instance, we see regulations being
adopted to restrict (or further restrict) construction in steeply
sloping areas, to oblige rainwater to be retained and managed
onsite, to prohibit construction or interventions in riparian
buffer strips along wetlands, etc.
An important tool in the arsenal of municipalities is interim control regulations, which temporarily prohibit new uses
of the land, new structures, demolitions, cadastral operations,
or the parcelling out of lots by alienation, save for certain
exceptions.
Such regulations can only be adopted when the urban
development plan is being amended or revised. For that
reason, it is not rare to see the amendment or review process
of the urban development plan last for years, even decades.
These long delays are required to build new infrastructure
or modify existing infrastructure so as to support additional
development. Thus, modifying the urban development plan
becomes more of an opportunity for the municipality to buy
time by adopting this type of drastic measure rather than for
its intended purpose.
Interim control regulations have increased in popularity,
mainly because they make it possible to quickly impose restrictions to a municipality’s development in urgent situations. Sometimes, these urgent situations are also the result
of poor urban planning. For example, an important problem
currently faced by many municipalities in Quebec is the lack
or insufficiency of wastewater infrastructures to support additional development.
This begs the question as to whether the problem was inevitable or whether a more thorough planning could have led
to a more sustainable development thereby foregoing the need
to put a complete stop to development projects for years. As
a result, a number of lawsuits have been brought against municipalities in light of lengthening deadlines and contractual
agreements between municipalities and developers.
The future of provisional control measures
Far from departing from this trend, the Quebec legislator
appears to encourage the use of these provisional control
measures in cases where water resources may be impacted by
works or use of a building. Indeed, Bill 16 amended the Municipal Powers Act (c. C-47.1) in order to allow municipalities
WAT E R C A N A D A . N E T
to adopt provisional regulations to prohibit any intervention to
carry out work or to use an immovable if the intervention could
create needs exceeding the capacity of a water supply, sewer or
water purification system, or result in insufficient water resources or deterioration of their quality.
Provisional control measures must be used cautiously and
judiciously. On one hand, these measures can be blunt instruments that depart from the obligations imposed on municipalities to densify certain sectors by creating Transit Orientated
Development (TOD) areas; meanwhile, there is a growing
and pressing demand for housing, particularly in the Montreal
metropolitan area. On the other hand, the failure to take actions
to relieve the increasing pressure on current infrastructures could
result in municipalities breaching their obligation not to contaminate the environment, including water resources.
In summary, there is a clear intention from the provincial
legislator and municipalities to better tackle water use issues and
increase its protection. While the legal framework keeps evolving, provisional control measures should remain an important
and legitimate tool for water infrastructure management, but
never at the expense of comprehensive urban planning.
wsp.com
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