Columnists
Part of the Sales Force
That was quite a full agenda Wellington councillor Mike Harper laid out for us in last week’s paper.
Fourteen hundred housing units are going to be developed in the village over the next 10 years. Our water treatment facility is going to be upgraded this year. The County-owned affordable housing corporation is building up to 50 units on the old Duke Dome site. A Wellington Heritage district is being established. Wellington park is being refurbished. A master plan for the Rotary Beach is being set up. The corner store has been sold, and is almost ready for redevelopment. Development proposals for Belleville Street and the marina are being considered. Council is re-examining its short-term accommodation rules, as well as its off-street parking capacity, and is taking a closer look at whether to offload the old Welington Town Hall. That’s just the Wellington agenda. Picton, the other designated growth area on the official plan, has its own issues.
Like it or not, we are plunging into a future with a local population that could double over those 10 years. And we had better hope that the future comes to pass as planned, because if it doesn’t, those or us who are still standing will have a heavy tax burden to bear. We need those extra residents to move in and start paying taxes. That is expected to cause the creation of commercial and service businesses to share the tax burden.
People who buy new houses don’t have to purchase here; they can go north to Barrie or west to Brantford. And houses in the County don’t sell themselves just because they are situated here Look at what had happened to the 12 Trees project, which failed to gain traction with a condominium/townhouse development until it was revived as Lakeside Landing luxury homes offering.
We are not just passive observers of the development boom, Collectively, we have something to sell to new home buyers—life in the County. And who are the best exemplars of that? The people who live here already, of course.
People who are considering whether to move to Wellington will be judging the people who already live here. How we comport ourselves with tourists and visitors, how friendly we are as neighbours, how we spend our recreation time: all these things will be evaluated by potential purchasers. That means that all those things that we valued prior to the Covid crisis—parades down Main Sreet, community dinners at St. Andrew’s Church, Lions Club Tuesday evening concerts in the park—are more important than they ever were New home purchasers want to know they are buying into a real community. We can deliver them one. We are part of the sales force.
As the pandemic winds down, there are lots of opportunities to get involved with planning and growing our community. Mike Harper’s article mentioned a number of areas in which public input is being or will be sought, and set out ways tp participate.
Those extra 1,400 households are going to be filled with additional voters for Council to keep happy. And what keeps them happy should be good for existing residents of Wellington too. But whether or not you choose to be engaged in County affairs, the best thing you can do is to get out and enjoy life in our community. It helps sell houses.
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