Planning and Public Engagement

The City of Saskatoon does too much grand project planning with huge consultant fees when these projects have little to no hope of ever being useful.

The North Downtown plan with a floating park over diesel train tracks while missing the simplest and easiest transportation improvement to lower congestion, is one example.

The Caswell Hill Local Area Plan, followed by the 2010 South Caswell Concept Plan, incorporated a very obscene and offensive attachment that had been included and officially circulated with this plan ever since. No consultant or City Planner did the right thing and remove or isolate this from general public view for a decade. In 2019, the 2010 document was again sent out by City Officials in the RFP for the old City Bus Barn site. So, while trying to encourage and promote this area, the document containing this offensive scheme was also included. It was finally a City of Saskatoon Senior Planner, not involved with this, that heard my complaint at a planning event. They took it upon themselves to check if what I was claiming was true, then once identified, they went further and had this page removed from the active file so it can only be viewed within City Hall if need be. To me, this shows the disparity of planning staff at the City. Some exceed what I feel is required while others fail to meet the minimum threshold.

The City of Saskatoon identified the Chemical Buffer around the north end chemical plants before developing this land for sale to the public. The City has routinely ignored the facts of their own safety buffer and how it now affects the Chief Mistawasis Bridge. The City approved of all the projects built to date, and now it is in a bind to admit it missed properly informing anyone about the real risks in this area (which are manageable when understood and planned for). The City is not acting purely in the best interests of the businesses that now reside in this area of the city. Restrictions, such as no public assembly or retail, tend to only mean something when they are what the City wishes to enforce, even when the intent of such restrictions is to prepare residents to save their own lives in an unlikely lethal chemical release.

The City continues to unfairly charge offsite levies against some residential and commercial properties when the provincial Planning and Development Act clearly states that they do not have the authority to do so. This document is the required authority the City must have to proceed. It is my view that this is an unfair City practice which ends up limiting infill development in the city. In other words, the City charges fees to infill development to help fund outward development.