Stephen Vance, Editor
The expansion of the Community Improvement Plan (CIP) incentive program makes a lot of sense. The first years of the program provided grants for businesses in the CIP area to make improvements to their street-facing façades, and it proved to be popular, resulting in real and obvious improvements to several buildings in the downtown core.
We’ve all driven through small towns in this province or elsewhere that have run-down, dilapidated buildings in what was once a thriving downtown business area, and while we have our fair share of empty space in our downtown buildings, those are certainly less obvious due to the fact that the buildings that are occupied are not only maintained, but have been improved upon over the last few years.
While it is understandable that our councillors seem eager to expand the good success of this program to include residential buildings in the CIP area, it might be more prudent to let this year’s expansions settle in for a few more years before opening up the program (not to mention the municipal coffers) to residential buildings.
New this year are “interest-free loans for certain Façade & Accessibility improvements; Planning & Building Fee and Commercial Development Charge fee-equivalent grants; and, a range of grant and tax-related incentives for remediation of Brownfield properties.” (Brownfield property is a planning term used to describe land that may have been previously used for industrial purposes that may have been contaminated and would be in need of remediation before it can be used for another purpose).
We’ve seen the cosmetic improvements that have resulted from the façade grant program alone – several downtown properties have taken advantage of the program over the past few years, and who today would say it hasn’t been a good investment on the part of the municipality? With a few thousand dollars in municipal grant money, the old Bluewater building on Sykes Street transformed from a drab, run-down, tired looking building into a vibrant, eye-catching piece of our history. The building that currently houses Meaford’s new optometrist’s office is another shining example of what a small investment by the municipality combined with an equal or larger investment by the property owner can do to improve the look and feel of an old building in a small town business area.
The municipality has budgeted $50,000 for the program for 2016, an increase over previous years, but given that funding can now be provided to property owners for accessibility improvements and the remediation of brownfield properties, the small increase in funding is more than warranted. Helping businesses improve accessibility will be a huge success for a municipality that has a higher than average senior population, and a lot of old buildings that were designed and built decades before accessibility was much of a consideration.
But expanding the program to make residential buildings eligible for either grant funding or interest-free loans would drastically increase the amount of money that the municipality would need to pump into the program – and we all know how this town freaks out when its municipal government wants to spend more money.
It might be wise to let the newly announced expansions settle in for a few years first, which would allow for more improvements to the business district and would also allow for a study to be conducted to see if the money invested by the municipality since 2013 has actually resulted in increased economic development and investment in the municipality. It’s one thing for Meaford residents to find their CIP area more aesthetically pleasing, it’s quite another to gather some hard data to see if the cosmetic improvements have actually generated increased investment, and by extension municipal tax dollars.
I too hope the program is eventually expanded to include opportunities for residential building owners to receive assistance with façade improvements, but let’s first ensure that it would be a smart investment, not simply a sentimental investment.
