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Photo by Jean Levac / Postmedia News

Let’s take the road situation first. This property is where Albert and Slater split as they go east into downtown, turning into a little plate of spaghetti between Booth Street and Bronson Avenue. They carry a lot of city buses now; once the light-rail system opens and most of the buses stop running there, the city intends to tidy the streets up by moving the Albert-Slater split farther east and closing a couple of hundred metres of Slater.

There’ll be less asphalt and intersections that are easier to figure out because they aren’t designed for rush-hour bus traffic, the thinking goes. Sounds good. City staff settled on this plan last fall, shared it publicly, took comments, finalized it, and are due to present it to city council’s transportation committee in April.

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The new plan for the library and its surroundings, in the form of a rezoning and official-plan amendment worked up for the city by the consulting firm FoTenn, doesn’t take any of this into account. Though they were released Tuesday, the plan and a stack of technical studies supporting it are dated last April and May, with a couple of straggly bits from the summer. They use the current, soon-to-change layout of Albert and Slater Streets.

Usually rezoning applications come from private landowners and developers. In this case, the land involved is owned by the city government and by the National Capital Commission. They want a coherent plan for the properties before constructing the library and likely selling the other land, so the city is in the unusual position of commissioning a plan and then submitting it to itself for approval. The city and NCC have split the $243,210 bill, the city says.