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Twelve days in, Calgary’s marathon public hearing on blanket rezoning officially came to a close on Monday night around 9:30 p.m.
But the vote on whether or not to change Calgary’s zoning regulations won’t be held until next week, according to Mayor Jyoti Gondek.
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The blanket rezoning proposal, which is part of the city’s housing strategy, is a bid to increase density in established communities by allowing for the redevelopment of single-family homes into other housing forms, including duplexes and rowhouses.
While more than 1,000 Calgarians registered to speak, the meeting saw a growing attrition rate toward the end of the public hearing. By Monday, it was common for just two or three members of a particular panel of five speakers to be present when called upon.
Now that the public submissions have wrapped, city administration will present a “what we heard” report to council on Thursday morning, recapping the results of the 12 days of presentations, which began on April 22.
The reason council won’t hear that presentation until Thursday is because there is another pre-scheduled hearing with roughly 40 items on it for Tuesday, which is scheduled to stretch into Wednesday afternoon.
After Thursday’s presentation, council will reconvene on May 13 to ask questions to administration, introduce amendments, deliberate the blanket rezoning proposal and then, finally, vote on whether or not to amend the land use bylaw to allow for blanket rezoning.
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“That gives administration and the clerks team the time to look over those amendments, make sure they’re put properly and that they’re in a proper sequence that makes logical sense in terms of how we move forward,” Gondek said.
“I don’t see this requiring days. The team on administration has been listening carefully and should mostly have their ‘what we heard’ (report) ready to go. In terms of amendments coming from members of council, people should have been working on this over the course of the days they’ve been listening to the public.”
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