Within a few hours of posting this, Markham’s Greenprint Sustainability Plan will (hopefully) be endorsed by Markham’s Council as a draft for public consultation. With an upcoming municipal election in October both politicians and community members will now have a chance to let the ideas from the plan soak in and decide if that is the direction they really want to be heading.
Markham has had a lot of press over the past few months over a planning decision on how to grow. While farmland on the east is protected from development by the provincial Greenbelt, the farmland in the north is designated as “whitebelt”. That means that Markham has the option of developing that land. The minimum standard set by the province as part of Places to Grow is 40% within the current built-up area. York Region set a higher target of 52% for Markham and Markham staff set the bar higher with 60%. A couple of councillors proposed the alternative of 100%. After extensive community engagement, the staff proposal was chosen by Council. That means that 60% of new growth will happen in areas that are currently built up, 22% will happen within the current settlement area (these are the lines on the map of the Official Plan but not all of this has been built up yet) and 18% on lands that were whitebelt. To put Markham’s decision in perspective, the neighbouring municipality of Vaughan is planning to accommodate 45% of growth within the current built-up area.
During the growth debate the Sustainability Plan took shape, lacking the controversy and the subsequent press coverage of the decision to build on prime agricultural lands. Despite the comparatively quiet preparation of the Sustainability Plan it has the potential of a significantly greater impact on both existing and new neighbourhoods than the growth decision. Rooted at the foundation of the plan is the idea that long- term success relies on reaching a better balance between social, cultural, economic and environmental priorities. And while a lot of sustainability plans might say this is their target too, they are usually environmental plans with the social, cultural, and economic stuff separated out and tucked away in the last chapter or two.
The plan has twelve priorities and thirteen objectives (each with a list of recommendations). The objectives and recommendations have been clustered around three strategies: Place, Function, and People. The integration of social, cultural, economic and environmental priorities through the implementation strategies has gone further than any other sustainability plan that I’ve looked at. There are a lot of big ideas in the plan about retrofitting existing communities, how to build high performance new communities, service provision for all community members, and partnerships with businesses, NGOs and other levels of government. The next steps involve outreach to the community in pretty much every way that we can imagine until the election, significant revisions to our draft, and an extra appendix that will lay out exactly what the next steps are in detail. And while it is sometimes crazy and overwhelming to be dealing with so many topics, departments, politicians and stakeholders, I am pretty happy with how the plan is shaping up and love what I’m doing.