Waterfront whirl

The backdoor deal-making only makes the Fords’ port lands scheming more dubious

Staring at nothing but rocks and trees for two weeks can mess with a man’s bearings.

But after stepping into committee room 1 on Tuesday, September 6, to watch the proceedings on l’affaire du jour at City Hall, i.e., Doug Ford’s recent musings about Ferris wheels, shopping malls and monorails on the waterfront, I realized I should have stayed in the forest and let the bugs eat me while I had the chance.

To recap: the Fords have big plans for port lands, of the backdoor kind. They want to take 170 hectares the city owns there and turn it over to the Toronto Port Lands Company (TPLC) – or their development friends, depending on your perspective.

Only problem is the city has an agreement with the feds and province to develop the site through Waterfront Toronto, which has been working on its own plans for some six years now and was scheduled to release its business plan at NOW press time Wednesday.

Tearing up that agreement may open the city up to legal liabilities. Other developers have been banking on Waterfront Toronto’s plan. But the city’s executive committee voted unanimously Tuesday to pull the plug in favour of the Ford plan, despite the loud protestations of the 100 or so who showed up to express concerns about turning back the clock on waterfront progress.

As usual, the Fordists were in no mood to listen. Giorgio Mammoliti, who’s warming to his role as enforcer in Ford’s mob rule, moved a motion right off the top to reduce the amount of time members of the public were allotted to speak on the matter from the customary five minutes to three. The deputy mayor, Doug Holyday, followed that with a motion to close the speakers’ list at 12:30 pm.

Then the mayor made his nice speech about transparency and any future development in the port lands being subject to public consultations. That got a laugh from some of the assembled.

The truth, of course, is seamier. The Fords have been plotting this waterfront power play from day one. The mayor’s brother, Doug, also known as the councillor from Ward 2, has been working behind closed doors for weeks on this one.

It was revealed Tuesday that he sat in on the in-camera meeting of the Toronto Port Lands Company board, the same meeting at which the decision was made to sole-source preliminary drawings for the port lands rethink. Curious, if not illegal, since Doug Ford isn’t a member of the TPLC board. Public consultation? What public consultation?

At another time and place, the Fords might have called that corruption. During the election, for example, they had no problem throwing the c-word around on the sole-source contract handed the Boardwalk Pub by the previous administration.

Let’s not begrudge the Ford brothers their more, um, muscular governing style.

But don’t they get it? The behind-the-scenes business on this one only makes their plans for port lands more dubious. The TPLC in its former incarnation as TEDCO wasn’t exactly squeaky clean in its development deals, which is partly why its mandate was changed under David Miller and relegated to management and leasing of lands. Now the Fords want to give the mandate to trade and sell tracts to the highest bidder.

I’ll mention one other fact here without going into it further: about a third of the area being considered for redevelopment in the port lands is co-owned by the city and private investors, at least one of whom with a lease on a valuable plot gave generously to Mayor Ford’s campaign. That’s not to cast aspersions on the Fords, but to make the point that where waterfront development is concerned, private interests are always angling to turn very valuable publicly owned tracts into profits.

Let’s call the Fords’ port lands gambit what it is: a land grab.

Eric Kuhne, the architect hired to draw up the preliminary sketches,  showed the committee some pretty pictures. He tried to dispel the idea that the Ford plan , a “high visioning” exercise, as he called it, isn’t about shopping malls and big boxes at all. It includes a “greenway” park as well as an “emerald necklace” connecting parks and gardens in six new neighbourhoods.

But he quoted one report saying there are 2 million square feet of retail space potential in the port lands. And that can only mean big boxes of one sort or another, along with the “café crowd” the plan says it hopes to attract.

Kuhne talked about turning the port lands into a “town centre.” It was noted by Councillor Mary Fragedakis that Scarborough has a Town Centre, too, and it’s a mall.

The Fords’ proposal can’t actually be called a plan, really, because there is no business case for it yet. That is, not much thinking has gone into its financial viability.

There’s been no thought, for example, about the shock waves that pulling the plug on six years of Waterfront Toronto planning may send through other areas under development on the lake. Or what the Disney-inspired monorail floated as part of the Fords’ plan would mean for transit proposals like the Queens Quay streetcar extension already in the works in nearby waterfront precincts. What to do about the plan’s most crucial part at the mouth of the Don, where lands are susceptible to flooding, was glossed over. At one point Kuhne suggested that a central park could be built there even if rising water levels in the spring might put the greenspace under water.

The Fords have stated two rationales for their port lands plans. The first is that there’s no money to cover the $634 million cost of flood remediation work needed before port lands development can begin. The Fords’ plan is asking developers to front-end those costs. Does that mean developers will be getting land at wholesale prices in return? You can bet on it.

Waterfront Toronto says it can raise the money for flood remediation work by doing what it’s done in the past – and what is customary in most such cases – by borrowing against increased land value.

Another argument made by the Fordists is that the pace of development on the waterfront has been too slow under Waterfront Toronto. But let’s be clear: the vision document for the site was only drafted in 2006.

The only thing stopping development of the Keating Channel, which forms part of the port lands, is the city, which asked the province to put pause on its review of the Environmental Assessment. The Fords’ plan, which they estimate will take 10 years, may in fact take longer considering Environmental Assessments will have to start from scratch. The port lands is full of contaminated soil.

There are good reasons for moving slowly on waterfront development. Chief among these is the fact that good planning takes time.

The principle Waterfront Toronto has been following is a basic one: increase land values to attract investment, an important starting point if we don’t want to be left completely at the mercy of market forces.

It has completed a six-year Environmental Assessment of the port lands, with estimates that its mixed-use plans for the port lands will create 54,000 jobs, and some think on the order of $1.2 billion in economic spinoffs.

Toronto’s former chief planner, Paul Bedford, pointed out during his presentation that successful waterfronts around the world have one key principle in common: they remain forever in public hands. He cited the example of Chicago, Doug’s fave town, whose waterfront was 100-plus years in the making.

The mayor’s political opponents seem to be willing to meet him halfway on this, incorporating some of the Fords’ plan into existing proposals for the port lands. The mayor would be wise to think seriously about it.

The Fords’ idea that government can’t do everything is, of course, true in a sense. But it’s fallacy to believe the private sector can either. That big idea of the Fords for a privately funded Sheppard subway extension, for example, doesn’t seem to be panning out.

But that one may end up looking like tiddlywinks compared to the waves the Ford admin is making in the port lands.

Origin
Source: NOW