WELLINGTON COUNTY – The province’s new fund aimed at rewarding municipalities reaching provincial housing targets is not likely to have an impact on Wellington County, says warden Andy Lennox.
He added that any funding that the province sets aside falls short of what will be lost from changes to the development charges act.
At this past week’s Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference, the premier announced a three year $1.2 billion program called the Building Faster Fund. The funding goes to municipalities that reach 80 per cent or more of its provincial housing target either assigned by the province or committed to earlier in 2023.
Warden Andy Lennox, who attended the AMO conference, said in a phone interview the announcement was light on details but it didn’t appear smaller communities such as those found in the county are a significant part of this program.
“None of the townships have a population of 50,000 or more, at this point we don’t believe that it does (impact Wellington county) but the devil is always in the details on this sort of stuff,” Lennox said.
In a new release sent out earlier this week, the province stated a portion of the overall funding will also be allocated to single and lower tier municipalities that have not been assigned a housing target which includes Wellington County’s seven municipalities.
“That is a fairly small chunk and even the dollars that they’ve committed for these programs, which is intended to go to infrastructure, is only a fraction of what was removed through the Bill 23 changes to development charges,” Lennox said.
“It certainly won’t make up what will be lost, whether that was their attempt or not I’m not sure but it certainly falls significantly short of that.”
Housing was, not surprisingly, the top issue of mind at this year’s AMO conference. Lennox participated in several delegations, mostly as part of the Western Ontario Wardens Caucus (WOWC) meeting with caucus’ and representatives from all parties to discuss key priorities for the region including housing, homelessness, mental health issues and workforce shortage.
Lennox said he believes the conference and the conversations were productive but acknowledged there’s a lot of work to be done.
“A lot of this is really tied together, homelessness and cost of housing are definitely linked and if we don’t have housing, we don’t have places for our workforce to live,” Lennox said. “These are big, complex issues. I don’t expect there to be immediate solutions but we do need to be working on it together.”
Overall, Lennox said the AMO conference was a good opportunity to meet and talk to other communities to share ideas to address challenges that appear to be universal in the province.
“Let me put it this way, I haven’t talked to anybody who’s not facing these issues,” Lennox said.
