NEWS: City withholds land-use draft plan

September 2, 2010
Winnipeg Free Press

Free Press complains to provincial ombudsman of refusal to release preliminary work

The Winnipeg Free Press has filed a formal complaint with the provincial ombudsman over the City of Winnipeg's refusal to disclose early drafts of its new land-use plan.

Over the past two years, city planners and consultants have been working on a new long-term planning blueprint called Our Winnipeg. The city and province are spending $3.2 million to create this new master plan, which will determine how land will be developed in Winnipeg over the next 25 years.

Early this summer, city council approved a preliminary draft of the plan, which Mayor Sam Katz and other officials have praised as the product of extensive public consultations that took place in 2009 and 2010.

Those consultations, which cost a total of $317,000 to plan and implement, included a one-day sustainability symposium the mayor hosted at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, a website called Speak Up Winnipeg and a series of public round tables.

The intention of the new plan was to encourage more sustainable land use in the city, including more infill housing and higher-density development, planning, property and development director Deepak Joshi and Our Winnipeg project leader Michelle Richard said repeatedly over the past two years.

But when the key land-use component of Our Winnipeg -- a document called Complete Communities -- was made public in May, the language the document employed calls for the city to "encourage," "support" and "promote" sustainable principles, rather than require them of developers in several instances.

The absence of forceful language and other aspects of the draft led some opposition councillors to complain Complete Communities did not reflect the intention of Our Winnipeg. Transcona Coun. Russ Wyatt argued the elimination of rural land-use areas would create a developmental free-for-all at the edges of the city, while Fort Rouge Coun. Jenny Gerbasi claimed on the floor of council the document had been "politically edited" by members of city council's executive policy committee.

Katz said Gerbasi's claim smacks of hypocrisy, claiming the Fort Rouge councillor supported former mayor Glen Murray's decision to withhold publication of a report about the state of Winnipeg's community centres early last decade.

"I think Coun. Gerbasi keeps mixing up this mayor and EPC and the previous mayor," Katz said. "This is the same Coun. Gerbasi who, along with Glen Murray, buried the PUFS (community centre) report. The first thing I did as mayor was release it."

But in an effort to see whether any language regarding sustainability had in fact been watered down in the public version of Our Winnipeg, the Free Press filed a freedom-of-information request in July to obtain draft versions of the Complete Communities document.

In early August, the city's planning, property and development department rejected that request on the basis such drafts may include "back-of-the-napkin" advice to government, in the words of the departmental freedom-of-information officer.

"The prior documents would have been considered more along the lines of working papers," the officer said on Aug. 16.

The Free Press then clarified its request to specifically seek the release of only printed draft documents prepared in February, March and April of 2010, when the Our Winnipeg team was making closed-door presentations to members of the executive policy committee.

On Wednesday, the planning, property and development department rejected the clarified request, again because the city maintains it constitutes "advice to government," and may be considered exempt from freedom-of-information requests.

Since all levels of government routinely release draft documents upon request, the Free Press filed a formal complaint with the provincial ombudsman.

Elected officials typically are not informed about freedom-of-information requests made to city departments.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

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