Joey’s Notepad: City of Hamilton Resumes Internal Development Review Team Meetings – TPR Hamilton | Hamilton's Civic Affairs News Site

March 28, 2024
The City of Hamilton continues to recover from its cybersecurity failure.
Next week, the City’s internal Development Review Team (DRT) will resume meetings.
DRT brings staff from various divisions together to meet with development applicants. The goal is to save the City and developers time (and money) by bringing everyone together to discuss issues and hopefully reach agreements on everything from parking surface materials to landscaping, height, density, and stormwater management. You name it, it is discussed.
This is a notepad post; I’ll quickly note that the alternative to DRT is long email chains, which take more time for everyone involved.
DRT has paused for the past month.
Next week’s meeting includes two files.
1565 Barton Street East (plaza with a FreshCo), Site Plan Application, “The applicant proposes to renovate the existing one-storey commercial building with a new façade facing Barton Street and a reduction of the overall building footprint. Also proposed are a new commercial building with direct street frontage on Barton Street and alterations to the existing parking area.”
304 Main Street East (Canadian Tire), Formal Consultation, “The proposed development as it pertains to 304-314 Main St E is to demolish the existing buildings and construct a 7-storey podium along with two towers with heights of 16 and 18-storeys respectively, for total building heights of 23 and 25 storeys including the podium, (plus mechanical penthouses) for the establishment of 355 dwellings units. A total of 1,256 square metres of outdoor amenity area will be provided, excluding unit balconies which are yet to be designed. On the south block at 17 West Ave S, the proposed development is to construct a 5-storey building, plus mechanical penthouse, which will provide 24 dwelling units, 96 square metres of outdoor amenity area. Overall, there will be a total of 248 parking spaces provided exclusively underground.”
A Site Plan Application is the final step before receiving building permits. Formal Consultation involves conceptual plans. It occurs before any official Planning Act application is submitted, FC applications are often use to test the boundaries of planning permissions to allow the developer to learn the positon of planning staff before spending significant amounts of money to produce a full planning application.