Internal audit context

Background information

Background information The City of Windsor's Planning and Development Services Department's general mandate is to advise City Council on all matters pertaining to municipal planning as set out in the Planning Act of Ontario. The Planning Act and other related statutes govern planning in Ontario.

The City of Windsor's Planning and Building Development Department processes applications for development projects within the City. This can be for applications related to Site Plan Approvals, Official Plan Amendments, Rezoning, and Heritage Approvals. Please refer to Appendix A for key applications by volume received by the department from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2018. The department intakes applications from customers which consist of both external customers such as residents, developers and the public, as well as internal customers such as other City departments (those working on a project involving an application). The applications are then subject to review against regulations and the City's Official Plan, and thus subsequently lead to a development decision. The Planning & Development Services Department's Development section is responsible for reviewing and analyzing development applications with regard to Provincial and Municipal plans, policies and regulations; preparing reports and recommendations to the Development & Heritage Standing Committee (DHSC) and City Council, Committee of Adjustment, depending on the type of application.

The City's Official Plan provides a policy framework related to the orderly development of the municipality over a 20-year period while taking into consideration important social, economic and environmental matters and goals. The Official Plan is a policy document adopted by Council under the provisions of the Ontario Planning Act. As such, it reflects matters of provincial interest and applies to the entire city. Using the Plan as a guide, Council may adopt more detailed planning policies such as secondary plans and community improvement plans for specific neighbourhoods, and it also directs the development of new subdivisions.

Under the Planning Act, official plans are required to be reviewed at intervals of not less than once every five years. This review ensures the plan remains relevant to the changing circumstances within Windsor and to current provincial legislation, policies and appropriate guidelines. This frequency is soon to be changed to every ten (10) years. At the time of this internal audit work, the specific regulations which dictate the change in the legislation pertaining to Official Plan updates were not officially released but, as per management, periodic discussions were being undertaken among key stakeholder groups, including the City of Windsor and the Provincial Ministry. In addition to this, the current Provincial government has also made changes to the Planning Act which has required the department to consult with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing in regards to required updates to the City's Official Plan.

The City uses the AMANDA system to manage certain planning and development applications such as Site Plan Control and Minor Variances. All the other applications are processed, managed, and tracked manually without using AMANDA or any other system due to system limitations within AMANDA. The AMANDA system is used to automatically generate a unique identification number for each application once a folder has been created for the respective application. Subsequently, the details of the application and the unique identification number are logged into a SharePoint site in a sequential order to record all received applications, track the workload amongst planners and progress against prescribed timelines as per the Planning Act.

In October 2013, the City underwent a review of the planning and development business processes to analyse and address needs taking into consideration multiple stakeholders and expectations. The review, conducted by the Consultant of Enterprise Risk & Project Management, aimed to improve business processes and service delivery to enable the Planning and Development Services Department achieve their objectives.

Certain key issues were identified such as customer complaints regarding speed of service, inconsistency of approval recommendations/process, lack of immediate knowledge/clarity regarding the current stage/phase of an application, and customers requiring to manually move the approval document from department to department.

The review yielded 88 business process improvements grouped under various themes such as improving distribution of information to approval bodies, improving communication with customer/applicant, centralizing representation of an application, centralizing application information and implementing automated workflow, improving internal communications, determining delegation of approvals, governing and managing applications being key among them.