Show Me The Data! (On Development Charges)

Our painful quest to create a database of Ontario development charge data

It has been a few weeks since we updated you on our Development Charge (DC) Data project, so we’re here to do that and to let you know we have made the first set of documents publicly available.

To refresh your memory, back in late January and early February, we sent an email to 220 of Ontario’s 444 municipalities asking for data on development charges. We asked for the following development-charge-related documents stretching back to 1998. Specifically, we asked for the following:

• Pamphlets (with development charge rates)¹

• Treasurer statement & reserve fund information²

• Background studies³

• Bylaws including amendments⁴

We intend to collect all of this information in a central repository so that we will have a large, searchable database to share with the public. This will help researchers, but also help the media and general public to be able to verify or refute claims made by politicians, such as "Over a decade or two, [Toronto’s] DCs are rising at not much more than the rate of inflation." That claim is laughably incorrect, but without the data, there is no way for the general public to know.

Under the Development Charges Act, 1997, municipalities are required to provide this information. However, not all do, and those that do often hide it in staff reports or other inaccessible parts of their sites, making it nearly impossible to access.

And that is just current information. Municipalities are not legally required to retain past information on DCs, so they often remove old documents when posting the newest version. This makes it impossible to know how development charges have evolved.

We believe this is wrong. Instead of deleting old documents, cities should make them accessible to researchers. We at the Missing Middle Initiative would like to see the information, learn from it, share it, and hopefully propose coherent and helpful policy solutions based on what we have learned.

We are happy to create a free-to-use central repository to host those documents, but we cannot do this without, well, the documents. We are attempting to collect them using several methods, but the obvious thing to do is just ask. So we asked by sending separate emails to 220 municipalities.

Our email results to date

• Emails sent to Ontario Municipalities between January 31st and February 3rd - 220

• Actual humans who replied - 35

• Municipalities that sent partial information - 14 (see below)

• Municipalities that sent all the requested information - 0

• Number that gave us no response at all, minus any bounce backs - 154

What we received from 14 municipalities

• Haldimand County: 77 files

• Hamilton: 57 files

• Dufferin: 50 files

• Chatham-Kent: 35 files

• Pickering: 33 files

• Grand Valley: 27 files

• East Gwillimbury: 26 files

• Tay: 22 files

• York: 17 files (but one of the files was a 2000-page document covering 25 years of information - yay)

• Oxford: 17 files

• Lucan Biddulph (including Whalen Corners, ancestral home of Mike Moffatt) : 11 files

• Township of King: 10 files

• Niagara Falls: 10 files

• Parry Sound: sent information, but the link expired before we could access it

We are still working on sifting through exactly what we have received so far, but we are happy to share what we’ve collected. All of these files are now publicly available on a shared Google folder, sorted by municipality and type of document.

We love you Haldimand County!

We have to give a huge shoutout to the good people of Haldimand County, who sent us a zipped file with a lot of what we asked for on Wednesday, February 12th, less than 10 days after we sent the original email. If this were a contest, Haldiman is the hands-down winner.

If you've never heard of Haldimand, you should go sometime. It’s situated on the shores of Lake Erie south of Hamilton between Niagara Falls and London, and according to the 2021 Census, it’s home to close to 50,000 people, including the most on-top-of-their-shit county clerk office in the province!

We don’t love having to file Freedom of Information requests

As mentioned in a previous post, some municipalities will not send us information until we file a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. We do find it odd that this is such a common response. Maybe overstretched municipal clerks use this to officially time-stamp the request, which imposes order on the process. (In Ontario, the municipality must respond within 30 days of receiving an FOI.) But we also think it’s probably used as a deterrent.

Kingston’s clerk’s office is not asking us to file an FOI, but is asking us for quite a bit of money:

$30/hour for the time it takes staff to search for and prepare the records for disclosure. If we determine the project will take more than three hours, which I believe it will, we can provide a fee estimate and will request 50% of the estimated fee to be paid prior to staff doing any of the work.

The Development Charges Act requires municipalities to collect the information but doesn’t provide details on how to store, file, or present it. It says that current DC information must be available to the public, but it does not direct governments on what to do with historic data, and each municipality has developed entirely different systems.

We suspect some of the files that house the historic information are not easily searchable, so finding this information will be time-consuming. However, that is not because these documents should be inherently challenging to find, but rather that municipalities have not adopted sensible practices for the storage and archival of important information. We are asking for information that they were required to produce and, at one point in time, make publicly available. It is incredibly wasteful for cities to spend millions of dollars generating documents that have substantial research value, but not make them available to researchers.

So we will be filing Freedom of Information requests. The first two cities we will be FOIing are Ottawa and Toronto. Neither of these cities responded to our initial request for information. Rude!

We will keep you updated on how this project progresses. And we hope that you find value in our database.

Best wishes and warm regards,

Meredith

1. Development Charges Act, 1997 Section 60(1)(v): The Lieutenant Governor in Council may make regulations requiring municipalities to prepare and distribute pamphlets to explain their development charge by-laws and governing the preparation of such pamphlets and their distribution by municipalities and others. 1997, c. 27, s. 60 (1); 2006, c. 33, Sched. H, s. 3; 2015, c. 26, s. 9; 2019, c. 9, Sched. 3, s. 13 (1, 2, 4-6); 2020, c. 18, Sched. 3, s. 10; 2021, c. 34, Sched. 7, s. 3; 2022, c. 12, Sched. 2, s. 2; 2022, c. 21, Sched. 3, s. 12 (1-6).

2. Development Charges Act, 1997 Section 43:

Statement of treasurer

43 (1) The treasurer of a municipality shall each year on or before such date as the council of the municipality may direct, give the council a financial statement relating to development charge by-laws and reserve funds established under section 33. 1997, c. 27, s. 43 (1).

Requirements

(2) A statement must include, for the preceding year,

(a) statements of the opening and closing balances of the reserve funds and of the transactions relating to the funds;

(b) statements identifying,

(i) all assets whose capital costs were funded under a development charge by-law during the year,

(ii) for each asset mentioned in subclause (i), the manner in which any capital cost not funded under the by-law was or will be funded;

(c) a statement as to compliance with subsection 59.1 (1); and

(d) any other information that is prescribed. 2015, c. 26, s. 7 (1).

Statement available to public

(2.1) The council shall ensure that the statement is made available to the public,

(a) by posting the statement on the website of the municipality or, if there is no such website, in the municipal office; and

(b) in such other manner and in accordance with such other requirements as may be prescribed. 2022, c. 12, Sched. 2, s. 1.

Copy to Minister

(3) The treasurer shall give a copy of a statement to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing on request. 1997, c. 27, s. 43 (3); 2015, c. 26, s. 7 (2).

3. Development Charges Act, 1997 Section 10(4): The council shall ensure that a development charge background study is made available to the public at least 60 days prior to the passing of the development charge by-law and until the by-law expires or is repealed by posting the study on the website of the municipality or, if there is no such website, in the municipal office. 2015, c. 26, s. 5 (3).

4. Development Charges Act, 1997 Section 12(1): Before passing a development charge by-law, the council shall,

(a) hold at least one public meeting;

(b) give at least 20-days notice of the meeting or meetings in accordance with the regulations; and

(c) ensure that the proposed by-law and the background study are made available to the public at least two weeks prior to the meeting or, if there is more than one meeting, prior to the first meeting. 1997, c. 27, s. 12 (1).