A small, but highly informed group of local
advocates gathered at the Guelph Bible Chapel last Thursday for a meeting of
the Howitt Park Neighbourhood Residents' Association. The purpose of the
meeting was to let the group’s membership know that they’re still in mediation
with the City, Armel and Silvercreek Development, and that they still can’t
tell them anything substantive about the fate of the triangular patch of
brownfield bordered between the Hanlon, Paisley Road and Waterloo Street. Still
with an Ontario Municipal Board Hearing slated for early January, the executive
felt they had to say something to the membership, said HPNGA exec member Ron
Foley.
To recap, here’s how we got to this point.
For years now, there’s been a question about what can be done with the track of
land known affectionately as “the Lafarge site” for the cement factory that
once stood on that spot. The factory was closed in the mid-90s and subsequently
torn down, since that time the land’s been used for biking, jogging,
dog-walking and numerous other functions by neighbourhood residents. Recently
Armel and 6&7 Developments, the peeps behind the Wal-Mart on Woodlawn,
wanted to build a 400,000 square foot retail park on the land. There was some
disagreement on that point.
On June 3rd at a city council
meeting, the city unanimously denied the application to rezone the area, which
would have paved (pun intended) the way for the beginning of construction on
shopping centre. With council’s disproval, it seemed to be full-steam ahead to
the OMB, a process that’s always costly and would be nearly repetitive after
the Residents for Sustainability’s decade long fight against Wal-Mart. But in
the days following, Silvercreek Developments, the City and HPNRA hammered out a
“wish list,” a detailed account of what each group would like to see. The next
step was mediation, a process that’s moved forward in good faith since
late-September and continued through to last Friday, December 12.
While mediation is taking place, a media
blackout’s been in affect, so news as to how the talks have been progressing,
whether that news is good or bad, has been unavailable. Foley says that members
should know by this week what the outcome of the last two months of
negotiations have been and more importantly, whether its onward and upward to
the OMB hearing on January 12. In the meantime, HPNRA felt they
owed their members something, and despite the difficulty in getting people out
to a community meeting in the midst of the Christmas rush, they decided to
bring the update, such as it was, to the group.
On the books for HPNRA now is the
recruitment of new members and fundraising. The current roster of 107 was
joined by some new inductees at the meeting, but the neighbourhood group is
reaching out to include members from the entire city to join them in the fight
against the proposed development. As for fundraising, the costs the group is
currently incurring is the retaining of a lawyer from the firm Smith/Valeriote
and a couple of urban planners from the Davidson Group. If the mediation fails
and the OMB hearing proceeds, both these costs will increase because, according
to Foley, the OMB will take you more seriously with the infrastructure backing
you up. Only one thing is for certain though, and it has to do with the most
controversial part of the development: the underpass connecting the south and
north sides of Silvercreek Parkway. The money for the underpass is listed D.C.,
or “Development Charge” in November’s draft of the 2009 budget. Going along
with this is pre-existing concerns in the area over traffic and the desire for
calming measures to be implemented.
Undoubtedly, there will have been
developments since the time I wrote this piece and when this issue of Echo was
published. For any updates that may have broke, head over to the old blog at http://guelphbyelectionbeat.blogspot.com/
for all the details.
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