Underutilized Land Improvement Strategy

The City of Regina will develop a community brownfield action plan to address four underutilized property types: brownfields, bluefields (e.g. former institutional sites), stand-alone surface parking lots, and vacant lots. This Underutilized Land Improvement Strategy (ULIS) will identify regulatory, environmental, and economic barriers to development. It will recommend specific actions, policies, guidelines and financial tools the City can advance to improve the viability of these lands. The strategy will include specific actions for the four property types as well as broader scale actions to support intensification in general. Regina has experienced a significant population increase due to a booming economy, primarily in the resource and agricultural sectors. In 2013, the Regina City Council adopted the GMF funded (GMF 10363) Design Regina: the Official Community Plan (OCP). Recognizing the economic, social and environmental benefits of intensification, the OCP has a goal to direct at least 30 percent of the population growth to the existing urban areas. Hundreds of hectares of vacant and underutilized land exists within the City boundary that has not been pursued by the development community due to site contamination, servicing constraints, land use restrictions and market forces. In order to achieve the OCP’s intensification goal, the City seeks to establish a strategy to positively shift the viability of developing vacant and underutilized lands. The ULIS will result in: • New municipal policies and programs to encourage the remediation of contaminated land within the City. • Increased opportunities for individuals to live, work and play within established urban areas, reducing automobile dependency. • Enabling the City to tie financial incentives to the implementation of green development technologies over and above the minimum standards. • The reduction of outward urban expansion onto agricultural lands by encouraging the redevelopment of vacant and underutilized sites. The overall Underutilized Land Improvement Project is designed in two parts: the Study and the Strategy. The Study will identify potential regulatory, environmental and economic barriers to private sector redevelopment through stakeholder engagement, data collection and analysis, and provide recommendations on how the City can improve the viability of these sites. The Study will include the creation of an underutilized land inventory, a comparative analysis of greenfield and brownfield developments, best practices analysis in tax policies and incentive programs, review of the existing policy framework and legislation. Based on the Study’s findings the City will establish the Strategy that will include: • Measurable targets and sustainability goals; • Specific actions the City can implement to positively shift the viability of underutilized sites, including the introduction of financial incentives, changes to current tax policies and land use policies; and • An implementation and monitoring plan. (Project description from original funding application)