Housing Enabling Water Systems Fund Application

Council approved an application to a $200M Provincial fund, aimed at supporting infrastructure funding to unlock housing.  The application is to support infrastructure improvements needed along Beaver Creek Road to support the housing development at Beaver Creek Meadows (Conservation Drive and Beaver Creek Road area).  Should this application be approved the City of Waterloo would receive $35M from the Province in support of the reconstruction of Beaver Creek Road, reducing the amount of funding we would need supported by debt and crucially helping to unlock the more than 2,000 homes planned in Beaver Creek Meadows.

Fire Rescue Expansion Funding Release

As discussed during our latest budget review, the fire station on Columbia Street is being expanded in order to improve safety and response times, particularly in the west end of the city.  Council released funding of $1M to conduct a feasibility study and to advance some architectural design work for the expansion.  The feasibility will explore the space and conduct preliminary review to ensure that it meets the needs of not only the new complement of firefighters, but also the associated office space, parking, equipment and mechanical needs for the expansion.

Culture Plan Report

Council received an update on our culture plan implementation.  The City of Waterloo’s culture plan has 6 goals and 37 recommendations, of which we are 91% complete in its implementation.  Some of the highlights from 2023 include funding of $200,000 to 20 different cultural organizations, more than 200 artists paid directly by the city, the implementation of a new artists in neighbourhoods program and of course the city’s signature festival LUMEN, which had more than 37,000 visitors producing an economic impact of $7.6M for the City!

Joint Service Initiatives Update

The City of Waterloo has partnered with our lower tier municipality colleagues on more than 80 joint service projects since 2006.  These are formal partnerships with either the City of Kitchener, Cambridge or both where we are leveraging shared needs to advance studies, strategies and more.  This does not include informal collaboration, which occurs on an ongoing basis on topics related to things like reconciliation, housing, green development standards, accessibility, government relations and more.  In 2023 the official partnership related to the preparation of our affordable housing strategy has ended, while the Advanced Monetary Penalty System expansion, which Waterloo implemented in 2023 and Kitchener and Cambridge are currently reviewing was also concluded.  We have the inclusionary zoning study slated for completion in 2024 (with City of Kitchener recently approving and hopefully coming soon to the City of Waterloo), while we have a Vision Zero program continuing as well.  New partnerships include related to forthcoming Official Plan updates as well as regarding sports and recreation planning in the Region.  Partnering with our lower tier municipalities where it makes sense and there is a shared vision is a great way to advance our collective goals.

Speed Management Update

Council received an update on the implementation of our speed management program throughout the city.  This program reduced all city school zone speed limits to 30km/hr, reduced select streets in the Uptown core to 30km/hr and reduced neighbourhood speed limits in Ward 2 to 40km/hr.  The remainder of the neighbourhood streets in the city will be reduced to 40km/hr in the coming years.  The long and short of it is that the speed limit reductions are doing exactly what we anticipated.  They are by no means the silver bullet to our speeding challenges in the city, but they are having a positive impact on speed reductions wherever they’ve been implemented.  Across the study locations for neighbourhood street reductions we saw the 85^th percentile speed (speed at which 85 percent of cars are driving at or below) drop by 7km/hr (4.4km/hr more than in control locations), while average speeds were reduced by 5km/hr (2.3km/hr more than in control locations).  In the school zone areas we saw similar reductions of 6km/hr (3.4km/hr more than in control locations) at the 85^th percentile and 3.5km/hr (2.3km/hr more than in control locations) for the average speed.  All of this was accomplished with no other changes to the street, only implementing a sign.  This is a huge development on our way to ensuring that our cities are designed not only for cars, but for the safety of pedestrians and cyclists as well.  Some of the streets studies in Ward 2 dropped by as much as 14km/hr at the 85^th percentile and 11km/hr at the average speed.  School zones reviewed in Ward 2 (Edna Staebler and Abraham Erb) saw reductions between 2 and 5km/hr on average speeds and between 4 and 6 km/hr on 85^th percentile speeds.  Overall the speed management program has been a success thus far and I look forward to the full implementation across the city.

Enhanced Traffic Calming Policy

Council endorsed the approval of an enhanced traffic calming policy to support and equitable and evidence based decision making process when contemplating changes to the built form of our streets.  This is the next step in our Vision Zero policy to help identify the worst offending streets, prioritize spending accordingly and to decrease implementation time on problem streets.  The City of Waterloo will now be one of the few cities utilizing a ‘big data’ approach to collect speed and volume data on our streets.  Modern cars drop a ‘breadcrumb’ of information every 3 seconds while driving in our city.  We will now have access to that data which will help us not only see areas where there is more speeding in our community, but also look at things like harsh braking and acceleration, which will help us identify areas proactively where collisions may not yet have occurred, but are likely to.  We are constantly reminded of close calls in our community and there have sadly been incidents across our Region related to bad driver behaviour.  Ultimately what is needed to solve these problems is broad behavioural change, combined with intervention by the city where appropriate in order for us to ensure that our streets are safe for all.  Whenever we are talking about large scale problems, progress can often feel slow, but I am proud of the work we have done on this file and hope to one day be considered leaders across the country on Vision Zero implementation.

Other Council Business

In other Council business Council received a report on demolition control throughout the city.  We also approved the replacement of the roof at the Rink in the Park alongside funding release for fleet upgrades as well as a brownfield tax increment grant at 119 Roger Street.  Tenders were approved for road reconstructions on Hillcrest Avenue, Quickfield and Langford Place.  Finally a draft plan of subdivision was approved for 91-97 Milford Avenue to retain 51 existing rental townhomes and approve 44 new stacked townhome units.  If anyone has further questions on these or any of the above topics, please don’t hesitate to reach out for further discussion.