A two-year amnesty program for Calgarians to register their secondary suites with the City of Calgary is going to be extended for another year and a half.
A lot of it has to do with the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Back in March 2018, Calgary City Council mandated that secondary suites had to be registered with the city. People were given until June 1 of this year to meet that requirement, which meant suites were safe and met building code standards.
As part of that, all development and permit fees were waived and any enforcement has been dealt with through education of the program.
At the Planning and Urban Development Committee meeting Wednesday, councillors were told that the COVID-19 situation is causing a number of challenges.
“A lot of the people we work with are not able to do the work themselves, they have to engage with contractors and obviously there’s a lot of hesitancy right now to do that work,” said Cliff De Jong with the City of Calgary building services department.
He told committee members that in the past three months, more than 1,300 owners have called the city looking for help getting suites registered.
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“There’s no doubt the program is successful, however, the current emergency is definitely impacting owners’ ability to make their suites safe.”
De Jong said to not be seen as punitive and unsympathetic, city administration is asking the June 1 deadline be extended to Dec. 31, 2021.
“Our goal was to ensure these suites are safe and so this has been successful,” said Councillor Druh Farrell, who agrees with the extension to give more owners the chance to bring suites up to building and safety codes.
Since development and permit fees were waived, more than 1,600 secondary suites have been registered over the last 21 months and there are now more than 2,600 registered suites in Calgary. City officials believe there are another 13,000 illegal secondary suites in Calgary.
While the committee approved the extension, the issue still needs to be voted on by the full city council, which will happen on April 6.
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