Comment
Shire Hall knows best
It took six years for this community to hammer out a new secondary plan for Wellington. After many brainstorming sessions, interactive public meetings, stacks of white papers, dozens of iterations, and revisions, the shiny new Wellington secondary plan was stamped, sealed and approved in 2016. It replaced a plan that had endured 36 years. But now, just four years later, Shire Hall wants to reopen it and have another look. Council was expected on Tuesday to approve a freeze on development in Wellington for a year to review our secondary plan.
It is on a dangerous path.
Official and secondary plans are written so that the folks who live here and those who might invest in this community have some clarity and certainty about the rules by which development will happen. In Wellington, we participated in a thorough and exhaustive process built on input and collaboration from the folks who live here.
We talked about the history of the place, the walkability of the village, the trees and the connection to the surrounding farms and rural families. Our plan, for example, insisted that future residential development be integrated into the existing village, that clear links—walking, biking and vehicle connections— be forged between the new and the old. There were requirements made for a variety of housing types to ensure affordability and to attract families. For a mix of residential and commercial to facilitate working from home. (Some might consider this prescient in the current context.) For tree-lined streets. For green space. For consistency in design with the existing built architectural heritage of the village.
These are just some of the community values that informed Wellington’s secondary plan that came directly from the feedback gathered from village residents. A copy of the secondary plan can be found by clicking here.
Now Shire Hall and County council intend to pause for a year to review the plan. There are two stated reasons for this review. The first is to consider how new residential development will integrate with plans to expand the village’s waterworks. Readers will recall that Shire Hall contracted a consulting engineer last year to imagine Wellington quadrupling in size to 8,000 people. It seemed at the time a bizarre and utterly unrealistic projection of the growth of this village of 2,000, with no basis in history or regional experience.
Nevertheless, the upshot of that exercise was that the cost to provide waterworks to a wee village suddenly ballooning into a midsized town turned out to be expensive. About $100 million expensive. But rather than reexamine the flawed premise of the waterworks plan, Shire Hall is instead reopening the community-crafted secondary plan.
The second explanation for the review is the “high amount of interest in residential development within the Settlement Area.”
Both explanations presume that neither the residents of this village nor the folks writing the plan, just a decade ago, did not— or could not—foresee the implications of growth. Both assume that we were all so preciously naïve that we could not comprehend that new homes would mean expanding waterworks.
Furthermore, it is demonstrably wrong to say this community or our secondary plan failed to envisage the rising demand for homes in Wellington. In fact, at the time of the writing of the secondary plan, there were more than 1,400 new residential units in various stages of planning approvals.
This underlines another problem. Grand prognostications of unmanageable growth have come and gone many times over the past two decades. In 2003 the municipality paid for a Growth and Settlement/Servicing Strategy that imagined the County would be home to more than 36,000 folks by now. Instead, the County’s population, rather than growing massively, has declined since then.
Neither explanation offered by Shire Hall for another delay holds much water—certainly not nearly enough to justify pulling apart a plan that was deliberated and prepared in good faith by this community.
There may be good reasons to press pause on taking on new development applications in Wellington. I can imagine that capacity constraints within the planning function of Shire Hall may be limiting the throughput of files, and therefore a pause may allow these folks to catch up. To focus on managing the files on their desks. There may be other good reasons. So far, they haven’t been articulated. That’s a problem.
Furthermore, there are potential hazards on this path. The pause provides year-long protection for those developers fortunate enough to have their applications in the queue. It gives these folks significant advantages, sidelines competition and ultimately weakens the County’s negotiating hand— at precisely the moment when it must stand up loudly and clearly for the values that this community identified in its secondary plan.
Yet, these worries pale next to the prospect of Shire Hall and council, seeking to undo the work of this community in its secondary plan. It requires a special kind of arrogance to presume this community did not contemplate the demand for residential development in Wellington.
But it is made absurd by the stagnation of new housing supply in which we are mired, and have been for 15 years. The terrible lack of new housing stock is making this village less affordable with every resale home that gets snapped up days after the sign pops up in the front lawn. A decade and a half of stalling and delays in building new homes is putting the prospect of living in Wellington out of reach for most families. There are costs of inaction. Of studying. Of reviewing. Of re-examining. Rendering an entire village an enclave for the wealthy is one such consequence.
Secondary plans provide clarity and certainty to residents, investors and developers. If they are to be rewritten every few years, we have to ask, why bother to create them in the first place? If Shire Hall is keen to rewrite the rules every few years, there can be no clarity or certainty. Only bureaucratic decree.
Hundreds of folks participated in the creation of Wellington’s secondary plan. They are watching this process. If it was so fundamentally flawed that it requires a year-long pause, these folks deserve a better explanation than has been proffered so far. Failing that, Shire Hall need not ask the community to participate again.
You seem to think that Wellington is in some way divorced from the rest of the world when it comes to the price of housing. The Canadian Association of Realtors published some statistics for the August housing market. Comparing August 2020 to August 2019, prices in Ontario as a whole were up 23.8% over that one year period. The Quinte Region was up 27.8%. Kingston was up 30.6%. Cambridge was up 24.5%. London / St Thomas was up 21.3%. The GTA in contrast was up 11.1%
A couple of things seem apparent: On average in Ontario a $400,000.00 house will have increased in price by 95,200.00. Prices outside of the GTA are increasing at a higher rate than those in the GTA.
Yes, prices are up in Wellington as they are in all of the County and as they are to an even higher extent in Kingston. Is it a lack of supply, the release of a pent up demand, an outflow of Toronto dwellers into the hinterland, or an increase in building costs? There is no simple answer here. As well, the issue of affordability of housing is not one only limited to the County.
County Council is looking for a way to direct development in accord with the Wellington Secondary Plan. If one were to look at Section 3.2 of the Plan Council is to direct development in a logical fashion without putting undue costs on the County. By putting in place an interim control bylaw Council is buying time to figure out how to provide and pay for the needed extra capacity in water supply, sewage disposal and stormwater management. This is not dithering nor is it a slap in the face to the community or the Secondary Plan authors.
Even assuming only the 1400 potential homes of the Wellington Bay Estates, Kaitlin Group and Fields of Wellington, that equates to more than doubling the population of Wellington. If it will take 100 million dollars in infrastructure costs for full build out with a 4 fold increase in population, we could for the sake of argument suggest that a doubling of population will require a 50 million dollar investment. That is over $35,000.00 per dwelling unit (based upon 1400 houses). Someone has to pay the freight. Council has to figure out who.
Thank you Times for allowing comments on this and all subject matter. This is a good article. Countylive in contrast will not post any negative post to their article on the Picton Marina lease deal approved by Council this week.