Official Community Plans and Zoning Bylaws

What is an Official Community Plan (OCP)?

The purpose of a Community/Development Plan is to provide a comprehensive policy framework to guide the physical, environmental, economic, social and cultural development of the municipality or any part of the municipality. 

What this means is, it is a policy document that guides Administration and Council to implement holistic growth. Planning does not occur in isolation and various factors need to be taken into consideration when planning for a community’s future.  

What is a Zoning Bylaw? 

The purpose of a Zoning Bylaw is to control the use of land for providing for the amenity of the area within the Council's jurisdiction and for the health, safety and general welfare of the inhabitants of the municipality.

What this allows a municipality to do is control how development occurs within their boundaries. This can be as detailed as architectural controls on houses, to simple residential development around a lake, or the protection of agricultural lands from incompatible development.  

Any Registered Professional Planner should be able to create a document that exactly meets the needs of your community, and it should be tailored to achieve your municipality's vision for the future. 

Bylaw Consolidations

What is a Bylaw Consolidation?

As municipalities grow and change over time, the residential demands on municipal bylaws prompts the need for Community/Development Plan and Zoning Bylaw Amendments. Once a number of amendments are completed, it often becomes difficult for municipalities and ratepayers to keep track of the amendments and what is in effect. The use of a bylaw consolidation is a useful tool to outline the existing regulations that are currently in effect of the municipality. Consolidations are also able to be used for zoning maps as amendments change the visual landscape of the community. 

It is important to remember that this consolidation must be accurate. As it is go-to reference for municipal planning and development, any errors from the original can create issues for future development.  

Subdivision Tools

How does a municipality offset subdivision and development costs?

When municipalities are provided with subdivision applications from approving authorities, they are expected to have defensible numbers for any costs applied to the developer. Recent planning and development sessions hosted in the area included interesting statistics that state in a 40-year infrastructure cycle (which is the average lifespan for infrastructure) the costs are broken down as follows:

Approving authorities typically encourages the Municipality require the Developer to pay for the construction and upgrade costs through the signing of a servicing agreement and contribute at minimum 13% (construction, transition, and planning and development) of the costs for that infrastructure.  

In regards to the Municipal Reserve (MR) Cash-in-Lieu, municipalities are encouraged to get the land appraised to a fair market value and then minus servicing costs to determined the MR Cash-in-Lieu amount that the developer has to pay.  

In order to achieve these requirements, the costs provided to the developer must be determined by a qualified professional. There are a variety of ways to achieve these numbers and Northbound Planning can help guide you there.

Municipal Mapping

What is municipal mapping?

Another service provided by Northbound Planning is the development of cadastral mapping for local municipalities using GIS software that is accurately georeferenced to land locations. This mapping allows for municipalities to update their zoning district map consolidations, and create base maps that can be manipulated by Administration and Council.  

Northbound Planning is also able to create civic address maps for municipalities. Using the same GIS software, locationally specific maps are able to created showing the location of civic addresses through the community. This is particularly useful for urban municipalities.

Our GIS expertise ensures accurate and comprehensive visualizations tailored to your community's needs, harnessing the power of GIS software to precisely map zoning districts, basemaps, civic addresses, and more.

Workshops and Seminars

How wilL interactive learning assist your municipality?

With the high turnover rate of Administration and Councillors within municipalities and First Nations, it is important that new staff and Councillors are educated on the standard planning processes of the community. Northbound Planning will come to your community and train new Development Officers, Administrators and Councillors on planning and development procedures. The following items are some of the training and seminar options provided by us:

• Familiarization with drafted or newly adopted Community/Development Plans, Comprehensive Community Plans, Capital Work Plans and Zoning Bylaws for Administration and Council

• Development permit application procedures

• Development Appeal Boards

• Subdivision applications

With over seven years of working at the local municipal level, Northbound Planning can also provide expertise on hosting information sessions for local ratepayers to increase education and awareness of planning and development initiatives.