In July 2022 I wrote an editorial entitled Growing Pains Have Begun, and three years later, we are indeed feeling growing pains as new developments are under construction, and new development proposals land in the hands of council with increasing regularity.
“For us locals however, the prospect of growth brings with it many fears. Fears of losing the spirit of the community, fears of ‘out of towners’ moving in and bringing their big city ways with them. As a result, with many new development proposals comes the inevitable opposition, leaving our local council to balance the stated desires of the community with the requests for approvals from developers. Just one of many reasons I do not envy municipal councillors,” I wrote in 2022, and it is just as true today, though the pressure on municipal councils from the provincial government to ‘build, build, build’ have been increasing, with municipalities that reach provincially set development goals being rewarded with millions of dollars.
In August 2023, the provincial government announced a three-year, $1.2 billion program called the ‘Building Faster Fund’ that the province hopes will “encourage municipalities to speed up municipal approvals processes and get more homes built faster.”
The program ‘rewards’ municipalities that ‘make significant progress against their targets by providing funding for housing-enabling and community-enabling infrastructure.’
Last summer I received many media releases from the provincial government announcing the funding that had been awarded to several municipalities for reaching those goals. Meaford of course was not among those to receive any of that funding.
This summer the second round of funding has begun, and the media releases have been rolling in once again. On June 6 I received a press release informing of Toronto’s $67.2 million ‘reward’, to use the province’s term. On June 18 came word of St. Catherines, Niagara Falls, and Welland receiving $6.8 million among them: $2.5 million to St. Catherines for reaching 85 percent of their housing target, $2.8 million to Niagara Falls which reached 116 percent of their target, and nearly $1.5 million to Welland for reaching 114 percent of their target.
This week came yet another announcement, this time for the City of Kawartha Lakes, which has been ‘rewarded’ with $1.4 million for reaching 83 percent of their provincially designated housing target.
Communities that are resisting development are not being financially rewarded and that can obviously put a local council in a difficult spot. Particularly in small, rural municipalities like Meaford, current residents often push back against development proposals, applying pressure on their local council to reject them, while at the same time the province is not only pressuring municipalities to ‘build, build, build’, they are also dangling carrots as rewards for municipalities that reach targets established by the province.
If you put yourself into the shoes of a municipal councillor for a moment, you will see that it is not a fun place to be these days when it comes to the pressures from all sides regarding development.
At council on Monday there was significant discussion about a heritage permit for one of the more controversial developments currently facing council. The Georgian Bay Harbour condominium project, first announced in 2022, is a five-storey, 100 residential unit building that will include commercial space on the ground floor. That might not be cause for concern for many, it wouldn’t be for me, and I live a stone’s throw from the property, but the project is to be built in a flood plain just metres from the river’s edge, and it is proposed to include underground parking, and that is a concern that I certainly share.
While some don’t want to see such a tall structure in our downtown area, the five storeys are permitted under the Official Plan, and the province has been pushing increased density for the past few years, so to argue against the number of floors is an uphill battle. The concerns regarding the potential for a flood disaster on the other hand seem obvious, and are obviously legitimate concerns.
I agree with councillor Harley Greenfield, who noted during council on Monday that “there’s just nothing about this building that is reasonable”, yet council must forge ahead with things like heritage permits while hoping that during the site plan phase the building can become more ‘reasonable’, or that the conservation authority will be able to determine just how much of a risk it might be to build a five-storey building plus underground parking on a flood plain right beside a river.
Often the concerns and complaints about new development proposals are subjective. Whether a building respects ‘heritage’, for example, if it is built in our downtown area. As has been pointed out often, the new library built by the municipality doesn’t have anything close to the look and feel of a heritage building, but as Councillor Greenfield noted at Monday’s council meeting, as an institutional building it didn’t need to.
Some might not like the aesthetics of a proposed development, they might not like the density, or they might even want to see increased density. Others might have traffic concerns or any number of other issues with a development proposal, and those are all things that can be debated, and there aren’t always right and wrong answers.
But I don’t think that safety concerns are subjective. I don’t think being concerned about potential flooding in a flood plain is unreasonable.
I am not an architect, or an engineer, or a developer, so I can’t pretend to know if that building should be constructed on that property; for that we rely on municipal and county planners and the conservation authority.
It is fine for Meaford residents to push back against development proposals. This is our community, and we should of course have input into how our community grows, but we must understand that by doing so, this municipality is punished by the current provincial government, or more correctly, this municipality is not ‘rewarded’ by the province for reaching housing targets set by the province.
As I wrote back in 2022, “Growing pains are a reality for this community for many years to come, and this community will continue to engage in the planning and development process. But we need to be prepared for the reality that we (collectively) cannot always be ‘right’, and we can’t always win.”
We certainly have some challenging years ahead.
