HALIFAX—There will be no height limits on development in the core of downtown Dartmouth if the municipality’s new draft planning bylaws for the area are approved as is.

Instead, developments will be limited by the ratio of their floor area to the size of the lot.

The draft Downtown Dartmouth Plan was unveiled this week as an addition to the first half of the long-awaited Centre Plan — the group of documents designed to guide growth in the regional centre of the Halifax Regional Municipality for the next decade or more.

Municipal principal planner Kasia Tota said in an interview that the two plans were originally separate, happening in parallel.

“We’ve been working on updating the Downtown Dartmouth Plan and bylaw pretty much for as long as we’ve also been working on the Centre Plan,” Tota said.

But during public consultation on the first half of the Centre Plan, known as Package A, residents repeatedly asked why downtown Dartmouth wasn’t part of the plan.

Staff decided to add the Downtown Dartmouth Plan — which hasn’t been updated in almost 20 years — to the first half of the Centre Plan, which after years of delays will begin the adoption process early next year.

“There is obviously energy and a big push for the Centre Plan, so this will allow us to bring the changes quicker than working on it as a separate plan,” Tota said.

The draft Downtown Dartmouth Plan lays out the municipality’s vision and objectives for the area. Tota said some of that is adopted from the old plan.

“We’re carrying forward the vision because we feel it’s still relevant,” she said. “We’re carrying most of the objectives, but we are kind of strengthening them a little bit with the Centre Plan core principles and we are providing downtown Dartmouth with all the tools of the Centre Plan.”

The new plan breaks downtown Dartmouth into four precincts: Historic Dartmouth; Central Waterfront and Alderney Drive; Irishtown and Canal; and King’s Wharf.

The area is also broken up into the Centre Plan’s categories: into downtown, corridor and higher-order residential zones.

In the downtown zone — which includes much of the area bordered by the harbour, Ochterloney St. and Alderney Dr. — there are no height limits on development.

Instead of height, the metric used to limit the density of development will be floor area ratio (FAR), calculated by dividing the total floor area in a proposal by the size of the lot.

In the corridor and higher-order residential areas, staff have prescribed height limits but not FAR limits.

That’s a departure from the rest of Centre Plan Package A and, Tota said, a preview of the coming changes stemming from public and stakeholder consultation.

In the rest of Package A, most properties were limited to a maximum height and a maximum FAR.

The municipality’s Community Development Advisory Committee (CDAC), which was tasked with reviewing public and stakeholder feedback and proposing amendments to the Centre Plan, recommended choosing either height or FAR. The committee, made up of councillors and members of the public, argued that restricting both height and FAR would be too prescriptive for developers.

Staff are following that recommendation, assigning maximum heights in some areas and maximum FARs in others. There’s an interactive map posted online at shapeyourcityhalifax.ca with the maximum height or FAR for each property.

Any developments proposed for downtown Dartmouth would also be subject to the Centre Plan’s design manual and any heritage districts approved as part of the plan.

Along with the Downtown Dartmouth Plan, municipal staff added three potential heritage districts to the Centre Plan: Harbourview, Five Corners and Downtown Dartmouth.

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Staff from the municipal planning department presented the plan to the public at a meeting at Alderney Landing in Dartmouth on Monday night. Tota said there were about 125 people there to provide feedback.

The municipality will continue to take feedback on the Downtown Dartmouth Plan till Nov. 9. Residents can submit their thoughts by email to planhrm@halifax.ca.

After that date, staff will work to tweak the plan in response to feedback. The plan is to bring all of Package A to CDAC in February 2019 to start the process of adopting the new bylaws.

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