City hall looks to entice developers to fill Regina's vacant lands

The City of Regina wants to say 'bye-bye' to its swaths of vacant land, and 'hello' to new developments.

Recently, the cityissued a tender to hire aconsultantto prepare a study ofunderutilizedlands in the city. It will become the first step towards forming a strategy on how to better attract the private sector to develop these lots.

According to the proposal, the city has several hundred acres of empty land, which range in form from surface parking lots and vacant buildings, to brownfieldsites and other demolished proprieties.

"We have to understand why development isn't happening," said Shauna Bzdel, the city's director of planning.

"Is it just demand, is it the unknowns that are related with developing a vacant lot? There's so many things that could come to play."

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The city also has a policy goal that states at least 30 per cent of new growth in the Queen City should occur in existing urban areas.

That means in order tomeet the goal, the city needs to get cracking on developing vacant lands.

New financial incentives on horizon?

The city wants the study to focus on what economic, environmental and regulatory conditions result in the prevalence of vacant lots.

The proposal says the consultantwill be required to prepare an inventory of underutilized lands and recommend how rules around land usage and tax policies could change, and what new financial incentives could be created that would spurdevelopment rather than land speculation.

"We're not limiting it just to financial, but financial incentives may very well be one of the recommendations," Bzdel explained.

The consultant is also being asked to scan the best practices used in similarly-sized cities and reach out to stakeholders, such as the owners of these vacant properties, the downtown and warehouse business improvement districts, as well as the Regina andRegion Home Builders' Association, to get their input on the issue.

Bzdelanticipates the study to be done by the end of this year, or early 2018.

City council approved the study back in June 2016 and its findings are to be presented to councillorsonce finished.

The tender lists a project budget of $100,000.

Cost of infilltorise

At the same timethe city wants to brainstorm ideas to encourage development, it intends to levy new fees on builders of infill properties.

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Staring this summer,the city's planning department will beginmeeting with industry members to determine how best to approach charging these development and service fees on new properties in established neighbourhoods.

Infill properties were previously exempt from these chargesbut were added in 2015 to ensure that "growth pays for growth," according to the city.

Bzdelunderlined that there is no firm implementation date set yet, and that concerns about the impact these fees could have on the push for redevelopment will be considered.

"It's not as easy to say that it's going to be black and white we're just going to be implementing a new charge on all infill development," she said.

"I'd be remiss to say that that's the plan going forward because we just don't have that level of detail yet."