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No Express for Transit Approvals Tighter Focus for Environmental Assessments Could Expedite Projects
March, 2007
By Barbara Carss
A proposal to include transit projects in the municipal class environmental assessment (Class EA) process could help reduce the time required to secure approval from the Ministry of the Environment. The Municipal Engineers Association has developed the guidelines to add a transit category to the Class EA process that municipalities now regularly use for road, water and wastewater projects.
Many municipal officials and transit advocates urge further reforms, however. They maintain that the EA process is often an unnecessary duplication of studies and public consultation that have already occurred as part of the planning process. For example, Toronto's Official Plan specifically addresses transit and identifies the major routes where service and operational upgrades will be made.
"We did 200 public consultation meetings on the Official Plan. It's a statutory document. It has gone through a comprehensive public consultation process and then through the Ontario Municipal Board," says Rod McPhail, Director of
Transportation Planning for the City of Toronto. "But as soon as we try to implement one of our transit improvements in public road allowances and rights of way that the City already owns, it triggers a lengthy environmental assessment process."
Proposed transit projects are currently subject to an individual environmental assessment. Proponents must begin by devising terms of reference to establish what the EA process will examine, and those terms of reference are subject to a public consultation process before the EA itself begins. This approach has the potential to turn an EA into a somewhat open-ended exercise since there are no formal parameters for determining what constitutes a complete study.
"There is no authority who could ever say: your list is done. So there is sometimes a feeling that you have to look at every possible bit in the world," notes Janet Amos, a professional planner and EA practitioner who has steered numerous municipal infrastructure projects through the approvals process during her 25-year career. "The Class EA approach would allow for a more focused approach on the problem being solved. It's for projects that are done routinely by municipalities."
DEFINED APPROACH FOR ROUTINE PROJECTS
The Municipal Engineers Association recently released the draft amendment to add transit projects to the municipal Class EA. The amendment was developed with financial support from the Ministry of the Environment, the Cities of Hamilton, Ottawa and Toronto, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), and the Regions of Waterloo and York, and it will soon be formally submitted to the Ministry of the Environment for review and approval.
The municipal Class EA process for road, water and wastewater projects was first adopted in 1987. It draws on the historical experience of municipalities that carry out hundreds of infrastructure maintenance, upgrading and expansion projects every year in Ontario, and sets out a defined method for identifying probable environmental impacts. It also requires an escalating degree of scrutiny depending on the scale of the proposed infrastructure project.
"If a municipality wants to develop a new landfill site or a new subway line, it must do an individual environmental assessment. If it were to build a new collector road or to widen an arterial road or build a new wastewater treatment facility, it would follow the Class EA process," Amos explains.
The draft amendment for transit projects covers four categories of projects - ranging from simple maintenance related activities to major expansions and/or construction of new facilities - which would require varying levels of public consultation. Many smaller projects such as bus bays, turning lanes, new stations and parking lots, passenger loading areas, transit loops and storage facilities would be exempt.
The move to include transit projects in the municipal Class EA arises from recommendations, released in March 2005, by the Minister of the Environment's advisory panel on ways to improve Ontario's environmental assessment process. There were also calls for a more streamlined process approximately 15 years ago when the TTC conducted individual EAs for six major subway projects - including the proposed Eglinton subway line, and extensions to the Bloor/Danforth and Spadina subway lines - as part of the Let's Move program. "At the end of the major TTC Let's Move initiative the Province of Ontario indicated a willingness to consider a Class EA for transit projects," Amos recalls.
VULNERABLE TO CHALLENGES
Critics of the current EA process say it is too unwieldy, especially given the Ontario government's priority for intensification in existing urban centres. Both the individual and Class EA processes require proponents to assess possible alternatives to a proposed infrastructure project, and this can become an exercise in which time and resources are spent to study and consult the public about options that are simply not plausible. Notably, the individual EA process for upgrades to Toronto's St. Clair streetcar line explored the options of dismantling the existing streetcar system and replacing it with buses or a subway, neither of which was ever a credible consideration.
"The process just allowed for all this confrontation," McPhail asserts. "It was really set up for [the period] when we were building roads and the engineers would be looking at possible different routes." Yet, failure to follow the required steps of the EA process makes a project vulnerable to challenges that could ultimately stop it.
Including transit projects in a municipal Class EA won't necessarily alleviate delays since objectors will still be able to request a "bump up" to an individual EA, which then requires the Minister of the Environment to review the matter and decide if the bump up is warranted. (The City of Ajax recently requested such a Ministerial review of York and Durham Regions' planned expansion of the Duffin Creek Water Pollution Control Plant. See Property Management Report, November 2006.)
"If the public is against the project, they want to believe that the Class EA process is somehow less thorough or a less comprehensive study than an individual EA, but that doesn't have to be the case," Amos reflects. "It certainly would be more streamlined, but it still meets all the same tests and the public would be consulted throughout the process."
As currently proposed, the Class EA amendment for transit would not cover subway projects, but would apply to light rapid transit rail systems and bus rapid transit. This is somewhat bittersweet news for municipalities like Brampton, Mississauga, York Region and Waterloo Region that have rapid transit projects in the works right now.
"We will be too far into our individual EA study to switch between processes," reports Yanick Cyr, Project Director of the Rapid Transit Initiative in Waterloo Region. "It could help for future projects."
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