It can’t be a matter of if, but when the province determines Barrie’s need for new industrial land beyond its borders.
With both Springwater and Oro-Medonte dismissive, at best, of the city’s development plans for a combined 2,200 hectares in both townships, Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall said this week that Queen’s Park needs to step up.
“We’ve been given avenues to publicly make our case as to what the need is,” he said. “The province needs to make a decision.”
Nuttall appeared before the province's standing committee on heritage, infrastructure and cultural policy, regarding the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing's study on regional governance, on Nov. 6 to make the case for Barrie’s boundary expansion for industrial development.
By mid-November, after Nuttall also made presentations to councillors from both townships, Springwater council voted unanimously to terminate discussions with Barrie about the city’s proposal for boundary adjustments and decided to send a letter to the ministry saying talks on the matter were finished. Oro-Medonte’s council has said it’s not comfortable with Barrie’s request for land.
“The main piece for me is always reminding my local MPPs that your people need to work somewhere,” Nuttall said. “It’s fine and dandy saying that we live in a different world where people work from home all the time, but there’s a lot of things that home working can’t facilitate.”
Conservative Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte MPP Doug Downey, also Ontario’s Attorney General, is in the unique position of representing people in all three municipalities.
Downey said Dec. 15 that he’s aware Barrie, Oro-Medonte and Springwater officials have spoken about the city’s industrial land needs.
“I’m not intervening in those or trying to steer them or manage them,” he said.
Downey was asked if the city’s industrial land request will eventually be a provincial decision.
“I don’t know, I don’t want to preclude the conversation,” he said. “I think we’re at our best when the municipalities talk with each other.”
Nuttall is pushing Barrie’s agenda on industrial land beyond its borders nonetheless.
In the city’s Dec. 6 recommendations for its new Official Plan (OP), which designates land use, to Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra, Nuttall said that as Barrie grows there needs to be a sufficient amount of jobs to accompany the housing growth.
Barrie city council pledged to build 23,000 new residential units by 2031 as part of Bill 23, the province’s More Homes Built Faster Act of 2022, which calls for 1.5 million new homes built in Ontario, again by 2031.
“I need the province to figure out how this is supposed to work, because we’re…paving the way for the housing to be built,” Nuttall said.
“We need the province to act on these issues. We’ve done everything we can to meet their requests, but if we’re going to see massive residential growth continue here…there’s got to be jobs for these folks," said the mayor.
“This is our need and I would like our OP to include a parcel (of land) outside of the city of Barrie for industrial purposes. We’re in need and we do need the province to step in.”
Nuttall said Barrie has just more than 200 hectares of privately owned industrial land left within its borders, which has been serviced to various degrees, but that supply isn’t enough to meet demand.
Barrie has all the other ingredients for industrial development, Nuttall said, such as power sources, water supply, sewer capacity, transit service to deliver employees, and Georgian College to train them.
Downey said all municipalities recognize the right mix of residential and employment land is needed.
“You need housing and you need jobs,” he said. “And where that balance is is something that’s generally delegated to the municipalities to put forward plans and growth plans and hit targets.”
Barrie’s new OP has to be forward thinking, to ensure Barrie continues to be a complete community, Nuttall said.
“I simply do not see how this can be accomplished without additional land,” he said in Barrie’s OP recommendations to Calandra. “It’s recommended that the new Official Plan also include a boundary adjustment to facilitate employment lands.”
Nuttall said he doesn’t expect any answers from the province until the new year, and still hopes for a local solution.
“I recognize that they (Oro-Medonte, Springwater councils) are in really, really difficult positions in the sense that nobody willingly wants to, in municipal governance, wants to give up land,” he said. “I wish there was a way to have a super committee, to have the three councils sit down.”
Nuttall said the city has not received any formal response from the province to Barrie’s OP request.
“The last time that we tried to ask for additional land supply was, I think, a seven-year process,” he said, referring to the provincially mandated Barrie-Innisfil Boundary Adjustment Act of Jan. 1, 2010. “My first formal ask was Nov. 6, so that’s the start of the ticker, for the province.
“They (the province) can act in a bunch of different ways. They can tell the other townships, come back to the table. They could unilaterally do something.”
