The Mayor of St. Catharines has released a new direction to staff to speed up planning applications.
Today, Mayor Mat Siscoe, directed the CAO and staff to adopt a housing-focused approach, including implementing enhanced customer service, and fast-tracking planning and development applications.
In addition, all City departments have been instructed to prioritize development applications.
St. Catharines approved a new housing strategy early last year, with a target of building 11,000 homes by 2031.
Just a few months ago, the city was awarded $2.3 million for hitting 80 percent of its annual target, breaking ground on 648 new housing units last year.
Part of today's new direction asks city departments to adopt a 'solutions-first' lens towards development applications, with the goal of getting residential and mixed-use development projects in front of Council quickly.
“Advancing Housing Accelerator Fund initiatives is a top strategic priority for the corporation, and implementing an expedited approach to our planning process is the first step in creating more successful outcomes for housing development in our City. This includes using federal funds to resolve a long-standing lack of development engineering services, expand our project expeditor program, and remove barriers to timely and thorough review of development applications,” said Mayor Siscoe.
“This, combined with a renewed focus on customer service – picking up the phone and working with our development community to get issues dealt with quickly and amicably - is going to get more housing built in our community, in line with our Federal and Provincial partners goals.”