Defend the heights staff drafted in the new Official Plan

Orillia's provincial growth allocation — set under A Place to Grow, since replaced by the Provincial Planning Statement, 2024, which carries the forecast forward — targets a minimum 49,000 residents and 26,000 jobs by 2051. In practice, most areas are limited to four storeys as-of-right under the current Zoning By-law; going taller requires a site-by-site zoning amendment. The arithmetic between that practical cap and that growth target does not work.

Staff have done the work. The new 'Our Orillia' Official Plan, currently moving through adoption, already proposes mid-rise heights — up to eight storeys in identified strategic areas, with a 'Tall Building' range of 9–12 storeys in narrowly defined cores. Council previously endorsed a minimum density target of 47 units per hectare for Strategic Growth Areas on February 4, 2025. The Statutory Public Open House on the Second Draft was held May 7, 2026; written comments close June 4, 2026.

My position is straightforward: Council should adopt 'Our Orillia' without watering down the heights and densities staff have drafted. The temptation in any Official Plan adoption is to trade away corridor heights for political comfort — a four-storey cap quietly reinstated here, a parking minimum reintroduced there. Each individual trade-off looks small. The cumulative effect is to invalidate the growth math the rest of the Plan depends on.

What I would do this term: vote in favour of adopting the Plan at the heights and densities staff have proposed. Pair the adoption with a binding set of form-based standards — angular planes, step-backs, ground-floor uses — developed in public workshops, not closed-door negotiations with the development industry. Adopt as-of-right frameworks on identified corridors so that conforming proposals do not require a Zoning By-law Amendment.

I want to acknowledge what this position is not. It is not a tower-everywhere plan; staff have defined where mid-rise applies and where it does not. It is not a deregulation argument; form-based standards are real rules. It is a position that the Plan staff have proposed is roughly the right plan, and that the threat to it is not too much density but the slow erosion of corridor heights through political horse-trading during adoption.