reviewing neighborhood plans, the proposed review criteria, the feedback we're looking for, the next steps, and give an opportunity to ask questions. Let's start with talking about what our neighborhood plans. Neighborhood plans are land use documents at the neighborhood scale that were developed from the late 1960s to the early 1990s in the former municipalities of Hamilton, Dundas, and Stoney Creek. They are usually a standalone map, but sometimes are accompanied by a text document containing details on local demographics, the consultation process for the plan, direction actions for implementation on matters related to property standards, traffic, local environmental concerns, social programs, recreation, and crime. While they do not form part of the urban Hamilton official plan, there are several policies in the official plan that refer to neighborhood plans and the guidance they provide. Neighborhood plans can be implemented through the official plan including secondary plans or through zoning bylaws or other city strategies and initiatives. Currently, there are 71 active neighborhood plans throughout the city spanning a variety of decades. Some neighborhood plans have accompanying policies, others contain undeveloped lands, and some show a proposed local road network that hasn't been built yet. Previously, there had been 90 neighborhood plans across the city, but on May 13th, 2026, council repealed neighborhood plans within existing secondary plan areas. So, the review does not apply to those areas. From the current 71 active neighborhood plans, 31 39, rather, are just made up of land use maps, while 32 neighborhood plans have accompanying policies in addition to a land use map. So, why the main reasons for initiating this review are that the planning framework has evolved. Most land use changes are now guided by other policy tools like provincial policy, official plans, and secondary plans, as well as newer master plans that guide the provision of services like the city's transportation master plan, the Hamilton parks master plan, and the city's recreation master plan. There uh neighborhood plans are also more restrictive and they're out of alignment with current land use policies and zoning. When they are not up to date, this can add an unnecessary extra step and complexity to the development review process. On the right, you can see an excerpt of a typical legend from a neighborhood plan. It is much more restrictive with permitted land uses, making distinctions between single detached housing, town homes, low-density apartments, commercial, and institutional uses, which are all permitted within the neighborhood designation in the urban Hamilton official plan, and in residential zones within zoning bylaw 05200, provided that certain conditions are met. Unlike the official plan and the zoning bylaw, which permit a broader set of uses like single detached, semi-detached, duplex, triplex, fourplex, and street town homes throughout the neighborhood plan, uh throughout neighborhood plans designate the majority of land as only permitting single detached or semi-detached housing, limiting housing choice and affordability. To continue the point on how the land use planning framework in Ontario has evolved since the time of neighborhood plans, this slide shows the hierarchy of legal planning tools and their function that are available to municipalities to conduct long-range planning, guide development, and protect the environment. Neighborhood plans don't exist as a formal statutory planning document for municipalities within the current provincial planning framework. So, they are only used for information purposes as a supplementary document outside of the official plan. Some neighborhood plans also contain policy text. These set objectives that get implemented through official plan amendments, zoning bylaws, or other city plans and initiatives. As non-statutory documents, these policies were an administrative tool for providing direction for the city to formalize recommended goals and objectives. Many of these matters have already been implemented or have updated objectives, goals, and directions, which are contained in more recent plans. For example, nowadays at the city, neighborhood planning is shaped by inputs from various strategies and master plans that are dedicated to select topics and take a comprehensive city-wide approach to providing quality services and public realm enhancements. Here you can see some of the plans related to mobility and parks and recreation listed. There are also numerous city plans related to safety and health, as well as infrastructure. Similarly, environmental protection and hazard mitigation, as well as cultural heritage conservation, are informed by multiple plans. Having now a background on what neighborhood plans are and how the city plans for development, community services, and infrastructure, we can turn our attention towards assessing the usefulness of neighborhood plans in 2026. The focus of this engagement is the proposed set of criteria that have been created for evaluating which neighborhood plans might be worth retaining and updating, and which neighborhood plans could be repealed. On the left column are the criteria category, and on the right are details about what is being assessed as part of that criteria. For example, the criteria category historical context has the inputs of the age of the neighborhood plan, number of amendments made to the neighborhood plan, and whether the neighborhood plan has been fully built out or has greenfield sites. 14 of the 71 neighborhood plan areas contain undeveloped lands, while nine neighborhood plans show an unbuilt local road network that is not documented in other city strategies, such as the transportation master plan. The last criteria is special characteristics, which looks at whether other planning documents or city initiatives and strategies address planning for a given neighborhood. When reviewing neighborhood plans against the first criteria, historical context, we're applying the following questions. Should the age of a plan impact whether it is removed or kept? Do newer plans have greater relevance? If a plan is being amended more often, does this indicate that the plan does not match current neighborhood conditions and is less useful for providing guidance? If there are still undeveloped areas within a neighborhood plan, should these plans be kept to provide additional guidance for future development? And is uh is it important to keep plans only with large large amounts of unbuilt areas? In relation to the first criteria on historical context, here is a map showing the location of active neighborhood plan areas and the decade in which they were created, with brown showing plans created in the 1960s, green showing plans created in the 1970s, yellow for plans created in the 1980s, and blue for the la- latest neighborhood plans created in the 1990s. Also related to the first criteria on historical context, our neighbor- our is this map of neighborhood plan areas not fully built out yet, which are shown in green. This map also shows a circle displaying the number of amendments made to each neighborhood plan from 2007 to 2024. These range from zero to four land use amendments per neighborhood plan area. For the second criteria, official plan policy and conflicts, we are asking the following questions. Are there situations where it is important to provide more specific guidance in a neighborhood plan? Many plans do not reflect the same range of permitted uses in the official plan and are more restrictive. Should those plans be removed? And the third criteria looks at the presence of a unbuilt local road network, which isn't documented on the city's transportation master plan. The map on screen represents this third criteria, showing areas where an unbuilt local road network is shown, highlighted in orange. The last criteria, special characteristics, contains a lot of inputs from various city plans and strategies on specific neighborhood issues, such as natural heritage, cultural heritage, parkland, urban design, community improvement plans, as well as density and major transit station area planning. At a high level, these are the guiding questions for applying the special characteristics criteria. Does provincial legislation, the official plan, and other city policies protect for the identified features? In terms of urban design, if a plan contains text on urban design, does the official plan and other city policies address the urban design considerations? And is the urban design guidance desirable based on modern practices? In terms of other city initiatives, does the presence of these other planning initiatives in a neighborhood plan area impact whether it should be kept? The last proposed criterion special characteristics contains numerous inputs and the map on screen shows a neighborhood plan areas overlaid with areas regulated by provincial policy, namely the Parkway Belt West Plan and the Niagara Escarpment Plan. This map shows the location of active neighborhood plan areas overlaid with the natural heritage features map uh shown on schedule B of the urban Hamilton official plan. These natural features amongst others are protected and regulated by the city's official plan and zoning bylaws in addition to provincial policy. Other parks and green spaces are also shown on this map. Here you can see the cultural heritage features overlaid the existing neighborhood plan areas throughout the city. The Ontario Heritage Act regulates the protection and enforcement of cultural heritage for Ontario municipalities. Lastly, this map shows some other community specific planning initiatives overlaid existing neighborhood plan areas. Major transit station areas shown in pink are areas within a 500 to 800 m radius of a higher order transit station, representing about a 10-minute walk. The provincial planning statement has established minimum density targets for major transit station areas. In Hamilton, these densities are 160 people and jobs per hectare for areas serviced by the future LRT and and 150 people and jobs per hectare for areas serviced by the GO Transit rail network. There is ongoing work to incorporate this provincial policy direction into the urban Hamilton official plan and leverage future development for community revitalization. You can learn more about searching for You can learn more about searching for major transit station areas on hamilton.ca. Community improvement plans, which are shown in orange, encourage revitalization initiatives and and or stimulate development and redevelopment. These plans allow the city to provide tax assistance, grants, or loans to assist in the revitalization of lands and or buildings. Meanwhile, the Bayfront Industrial Area Strategy, which is shown in purple, deals with the revitalization of the industrial lands of the Hamilton Harbour. Before we conclude tonight's presentation and move into the Q&A portion, the last important piece for you to know is the project timeline and the future opportunities to provide comments and feedback on the project. Shown on screen are the key project milestones following public consultation on the proposed review criteria. At the end of July, we will be working through the fall summarizing and incorporating the feedback received. The results of the feedback and revisions to the criteria presented today will be shared with all of those who have participated or signed up to be on the project mailing list. That feedback will then be presented to planning committee in early 2027, along with the preliminary analysis and recommendation for each neighborhood plan. In the spring of 2027, we will be doing further consultation to collect public feedback on the revised criteria and how they've been applied for each a neighborhood plan recommendation. Following that consultation in the late spring or early summer of next year, a final report will be presented to planning committee. There has been a lot of information provided tonight, so I would like to take a moment to highlight the key key questions that we are generally looking for uh from your input regarding this neighborhood plans review. Are there criteria that have we've missed? Are there criteria that you don't think are important? Looking at the questions noted earlier, how should we be applying the criteria? And is there any specific knowledge you have on your neighborhood that you wish to share with us? This concludes the question the presentation and we we will be now taking questions. Um we are going to post a Q&A summary on the Engage Hamilton page in the days following the meeting. If there are any questions that we can't be answered tonight, we will make sure to have a response to them included in our Q&A summary. And I wanted to note that if you have a question after the webinar, please feel free to contact me. My contact information will be on the next slide and is posted on Engage Hamilton. So I'll I'll turn it over to Melanie to read out any questions tonight. >> Great. Thanks, Dimitri. Uh maybe if you would like to slip to the next slide as well with your contact information, we can just put that up on the screen for everyone. >> Okay. >> Okay, so I'm I'm just going to give everyone a few moments to maybe think about some of the information that's been presented tonight. And if you do have any questions, um just put them in the Q&A and uh they'll come through and we'll see them. So I'll I'll just give everyone a pause to see if there's any questions from our attendees. Okay, so I'm not seeing any questions coming in at this time. Um as Dmitri noted, if you do have questions that uh come up after the meeting, um you are welcome to send them on to Dmitri and uh we'll do our best to answer those as soon as possible. Um and uh we're always available if if you have anything that you need to discuss with us about the project um after this event is complete. Oh. >> I I see that we did get a question just now from Roberta. >> Yes, so the question is, what is your starting point for revision of the neighborhood plan or past plan? >> Um okay, uh so I our starting point for revising the neighborhood plans is really we're going to be creating um following this consultation, we'll be creating a checklist template of a of questions um applying the criteria that we would look at when we're assessing each neighborhood plan and whether or not um it might have useful guidance for being worth carrying forward. I um uh I'm not sure if there's maybe uh uh something specific that uh that you mean by the question, but uh right now at this stage of the project, we are just consulting on some criteria and we would be applying those criteria as the starting point for evaluating neighborhood plans. >> And maybe if I can just add to that, so I think after we complete that it that preliminary review, um we'll have some recommendations coming out of that for which plans would be um recommended for removal or repeal uh and ones that we may want to look at further for updating and then at that point we'd we'd be maybe providing some initial recommendations about what types of updates that we would be looking at making for those plans. Okay, I see another post. Yes, so the presentation stated the Duran neighborhood plan was at the 1970s. We have in our archives an approved plan from 1987. So that's that's correct. There was an initial plan that was first approved in 1974. And then an updated that was approved in 1987. So you are correct the current plan that's in place is the 1987 plan. >> Yeah, I will also just add then then thank you for that context. So to kind of answer your question your first initial question then we would be starting the review from the neighborhood plan that's currently active. So in the case of Durant the latest neighborhood plan was approved in 1987. So we're looking at that version that's currently active right now. And um we'll be reviewing it based on the criteria going forward. >> Okay, we do have another question that came in. So after the criteria are set and the evaluation is completed is the intent to update the plans? And further will the intent to include the will will there be an intent to include the plans into the body of the urban Hamilton official plan? So, maybe you want to take a stab at that first, Dimitri? >> Yeah, so um after following this uh first phase of uh consultation, we will be finalizing the criteria and creating a preliminary evaluation um for eight neighborhood plans that will be identified as um uh needing to be kept, um we will be looking at updating them in the future, but that will be um a separate exercise uh um mostly looking at updating the land use permissions in those neighborhood plans so that they're in alignment with the zoning by-law and the urban Hamilton official plan. But, we'll also be doing um potentially a deeper dive exercise depending on the neighborhood plan that's being kept or not because um as noted on the presentation, some of the neighborhood plans are simply maps. Um so, when those were um identified as needing to be kept, we would um be updating the land use permissions on that map to match um uh applicable zoning. But, um if it's a neighborhood plan that has uh uh policies that it comes with, uh we would be taking a look at those policies and reviewing the merit of them um and whether they should be kept or if there's something in there that um isn't captured through um existing city processes. >> And maybe just on the question of the urban Hamilton official plan, um I think we would be looking at as well um for example, if it's maybe more appropriate to have some of the directions of a neighborhood plan um included in our urban Hamilton official plan um whether that's most appropriate instead of keeping the neighborhood plan. So, we are um really looking at all options with regards to the neighborhood plans um and where it's appropriate to um be bringing those directions in. So, that is an option a potential option that we might be looking at for some uh plans. I'm just going to give a minute to see if there's any more questions coming in. Okay, I don't see any new questions, Dimitri. >> Well, okay. >> Yep. >> Yeah, okay. I hope that means that um today's presentation was informative, but again, as a reminder, if you do have any questions that come up later after this meeting because I know um there was a lot of information tonight, uh please um feel free to contact me at dimitri.kouryna@hamilton.ca. And please visit the Engage Hamilton page to fill out the project survey and uh leave us any comments um Thank Yeah, so on behalf of all staff from the city, thank you for attending this evening. Please visit the project web page to review the materials online and email the project team at the email shown if you have any follow-up questions. On there you can also sign up for email updates and we would appreciate any comments before July 31st, 2026. Thank you again and take care.