With the city’s development charges scheduled to jump by 9.9 per cent effective July 1, Ward 11 Coun. Bill Leduc said he’d prefer to see a much lower price hike.
“I find that increase harsh,” he told his colleagues during Tuesday’s finance and administration committee meeting. “I don’t want to stall our construction industry.”
The development charge hike follows last year’s increase of 17.2 per cent, creating a two-year total increase of more than 27 per cent.
Last year, Leduc put forward an unsuccessful motion to limit that year’s increase to 4.4 per cent. He spoke up against this year’s increase as well, but didn’t introduce a motion on Tuesday.
“I was hoping to get some support last night,” he told Sudbury.com after the meeting, adding that when it became obvious this year’s attempt would again fail, he didn’t bring forward a motion.
“We’ve got to look at all our bylaws, because this is what’s preventing us from doing a lot of things that need to be done.”
The city’s development charges bylaw expires on June 30, 2024, and city administrators are currently reviewing it to draft a recommended replacement for city council consideration.
“This council is committed to growing our population, growing our tax base, so we’ve got to review these bylaws to make that stuff happen,” Leduc said, arguing that more needs to be done to spur the construction of housing across the continuum, from affordable to high-end.
Like last year’s development charges increase, the one taking effect July 1 follows the city’s existing bylaw.
Development charges are indexed according to the Statistics Canada Quarterly Construction Price Statistics (non-residential building construction index). With no such statistics available for Sudbury, the inflationary change for Ottawa is used. The increase from December 2021 to 2022 was 9.9 per cent, which the city is also ascribing to its development charges increase.
“Development charges are used to fund the growth-related portions of capital upgrades to city infrastructure like buildings, roads, intersections and water wastewater pipes,” according to a report by city administration. The city’s development charges follow a “growth pays for growth” approach.
City development charges vary depending on the type of development and which services are included, but for full-serviced single-family dwellings it means a cost increase to $24,356 from the current $22,162 per unit.
Last year’s development charge increase spurred a debate regarding whether the city’s development charges were unreasonable.
Although some municipalities’ development-related charges were lower than those in Greater Sudbury, the city’s charges were on the low end of the scale in Ontario as a whole.
The average single detached family dwelling development charge among 114 Ontario municipalities listed in the 2021 BMA Management Consulting Inc. report was $40,217. At the time, it was $18,910 in Greater Sudbury.
On the development charges front, the provincial Bill 23 is slated to shift approximately $7.5 million from development-related fees onto Greater Sudbury taxpayers within the next few years.
The impact of Bill 23 on Greater Sudbury is much less than it is for other municipalities, city CAO Ed Archer said, “because our development charges are all already relatively low.”
The city has also been “ahead of the curve” on certain things Bill 23 now requires of municipalities, director of planning services Kris Longston said, such as allowing development charge exemptions for secondary units.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
