Charlottetown defers new controversial zoning bylaw 20 days before election

Charlottetown’s incoming council will likely have a big job right off the bat. City council voted at its Oct. 13 regular meeting to defer the new zoning and development bylaw and have more debate over some of the major changes.

The city has been working on a new zoning bylaw for months, going to multiple sessions of public engagement and planning board debate. However, the full council has not had much debate on the details. So, the deferral intends to give extra time for that discussion, even if it runs into the new council period. Charlottetown residents will elect a new council on Nov. 2, which will be sworn in the first week of December.

Deputy Mayor Alanna Jankov, who chairs the planning and heritage committee, said moving it to the next council would likely mean starting the process all over again. In an interview after the meeting she said she still wants to see some form of bylaw passed before the swearing in.

“It’s this council’s responsibility for us to finish our work, and in the coming weeks or years if councils in the future find some aspects of this bylaw aren’t working anymore, then amendments can always happen.”

There was almost an hour of debate on two deferrals related to the bylaw. The first, moved by Coun. Mitchell Tweel, called for delaying the vote until the new council comes in.

That motion fell 5-6, with councillors Bob Doiron, Terry Bernard, Trevor MacKinnon, Kevin Ramsay and Tweel voting in favour , while Jankov and councillors John McAleer, Norman Beck, Justin Muttart and Julie McCabe voted against. Mayor Philip Brown voted to break a 5-5 tie and reject Tweel’s deferral.

About 15 minutes later, the second deferral also landed in a tie, but Brown voted to approve it. The vote was Beck, Muttart, Ramsay, McCabe and MacKinnon in favour, with Jankov, Doiron, Bernard, McAleer and Tweel opposed.

The plan now is to hold a full council meeting with only the zoning bylaw on the agenda. Councillors who voted for the second deferral asked for this to come as soon as next week, with a possible final vote before the swearing in.

Speaking on his motion before the vote, Tweel called for the council to go back to the city’s neighbourhoods and help residents understand the complicated document and implications. There is no rush to approve the new bylaw, he said.

“These residents in these respective communities are paying big, big taxes. They want their neighbourhoods protected. They want the characters preserved, the streetscape. They want what they have now, and they don’t want it altered in any which way, shape or form.”

Bernard agreed with Tweel about taking more time for everyone to understand the document.

Some councillors who spoke against — but still voted for the second deferral — said the council still had work to do in their terms. Beck said it would be unfair to load the work onto a new council, especially when the current one has the most information on the topic.

“We’ve all heard the concerns,” he said. “But we have to have some time to figure out what path do we want to chart going forward.”

McAleer said he, like the other councillors, had heard plenty about the bylaw on the campaign trail. But, while others spoke about hearing fears around allowing four units as of right in lots of a certain size, his residents were more split, he said.

Voters under 40 were largely in favour. Older residents were about two thirds opposed and one third in favour, he said.

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Logan MacLean is a municipal reporter for The Guardian in Prince Edward Island. He can be reached at lmaclean@postmedia.com and followed on X @loganmaclean94.