Wednesday, the council made changes to the law that will govern library boxes and verge gardens
As part of changes to bylaws that will make verge gardens and little free library boxes legal, the Ottawa city council loosened proposed rules for them.
But Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said that people shouldn’t worry about a crackdown, even if their gardens and boxes break the new rules.
“We’re not going to keep an eye on these things all the time, and we don’t want to use a heavy hand here,” he said. “It’s just to make it clear what should be okay and what shouldn’t be.”
The rules cover right-of-way boulevards, which are pieces of land owned by the city that run along the sides of streets and often go well into people’s front yards. Up until now, the bylaw didn’t allow any changes there, but the city did sometimes make exceptions.
The city staff had first suggested rules that put strict limits on how high plants or boxes can be and how close they can be to the road. They also wanted to ban things like permanent foundations and edible plants. The council’s transportation committee made some small changes, like cutting the distance between little libraries and the street by half, to 50 centimeters.
Council makes more change
On Wednesday, new changes were brought to the city council that gave gardeners and front-yard librarians more freedom.
Shawn Menard, councillor for the Capital ward, suggested raising the maximum height of plants from 0.75 to 1 meter on city-owned right-of-way gardens, except on street corners where they could block people’s views. That vote went through.
Staff wanted to keep little libraries on local roads, but council voted to let them be on busier collector roads as well. It would also let people put up their own cabinets on main roads, but only on lawns next to sidewalks.
Still, library boxes around the city come in many different shapes and sizes, and it’s likely that some won’t meet the new rules.
Mimi Golding had a run-in with the bylaw department over her small library many years ago. She told CBC at the time that she saw the heavy hand of the bureaucracy stifling a grass-roots effort, and she criticized height limits in particular.
This rule, which says that library boxes can only be between 0.9 and 1.1 meters tall for accessibility’s sake, was not changed on Wednesday.
“I think there’s a lot of proof that many of the rules we have about things like this aren’t followed or aren’t followed very strongly.”There is usually contact with the residents,” Sutcliffe said.
“Right now, we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for people to do these things in a way that doesn’t bother other people or get in the way, and to let them do as much of this as they can, within reason.”