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Unintended consequences
It’s a good village. Walkable. Hugging a Great Lake that stretches to the horizon. Majestic tree-lined streets. Most of the goods and services one needs in life. The Millennium Trail. The Dukes. A spacious and welcoming waterside park. Beach and boardwalk. A dock offering access to two lakes. A noble library. A great many terrific wineries just an easy bicycle ride away. It’s a good village.
So now what?
It’s a question we face every decade or so. What is Wellington becoming? And what should we do to ensure that whatever comes next doesn’t diminish the place we call home—that it doesn’t suffer the fate of so many other faceless, interchangeable towns and villages. There is risk in doing nothing. Risk in doing too much. Risk in doing the wrong thing. And always the risk of unintended consequences. The road to hell, and all that.
Most everyone understands on some level the specialness of Wellington’s Main Street—particularly from Maple to Consecon Street. Formed by intervals of prosperity and hardship, much of the built heritage left to us is more than a century old. Their shapes, scale, proximity to the street, doors, windows, and such are visual cues that remind us of the distinctiveness of our village.
No one wants to see it diminished. Let us start with this premise.
How we pull it off is the more pertinent question. On this point, there is bound to be a divergence of opinions and prescriptions. As it should be.
The municipality, along with architectural consultant Carl Bray, has released a draft of a plan aimed at congealing the village’s special qualities and making it more difficult to erase or diminish its characteristic features. The draft Heritage Conservation District Plan (HCD) gives the municipality a layer of discretion between property owners captured in the district and the notions they may have to renovate, demolish, rebuild or alter the exterior of their buildings. Once the HCD is passed, such plans will be subject to a Heritage Permit through which municipal staff, along with guidance from the Prince Edward Heritage Advisory Committee, will assess the impact of such proposals on the character of the village.
It is a safeguard, rather than a block. Negative permit decisions may be appealed to council and ultimately to the Ontario Land Tribunal.
The HCD Plan is available now for review and the County has set May 5 for a virtual public meeting to get public feedback. (Details about the HCD Plan and meeting—you will need to register in advance—are available here.) If you reside in the village, own property or just like spending time in Wellington, you will want to spend some time with the plan—before it becomes the rule.
This is because of the risks entangled in such a plan. We need to think this through. Carefully. We must consider what could go wrong before we ask our municipal leaders to put their stamp on this plan.
Let us start with the obvious. Not everything is worthy of conservation. Keeping stuff just because it is old is called hoarding in any other context. Ultimately it becomes a subjective exercise— vulnerable to fads and the whims of the day, or the views of the folks approving heritage permits.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with a slowdown- and think-things-through pause button on redevelopment proposals—as long as there is a workable appeals process—it does add another layer of work and responsibility to the County’s planning department— a group challenged by chronic understaffing and historic difficulties recruiting and retaining staff. It also adds to the cost of such projects. This increases the risk to the conservation ambition.
How will the County prioritize its workload? New subdivision or an addition to the cottage on Narrow Street? Will property owners put off structural repairs for fear of being caught in the County’s labyrinth?
Yet there are bigger questions beyond the purely functional ones: How does the HCD match up with the village’s Secondary Plan? The Secondary Plan calls for greater density and intensification of development in the village core. The HCD may make such projects unworkable. Which document takes precedence?
The Secondary Plan was hammered out in an intensely public process. The HCD less so. Not yet anyway. Where these documents come into conflict may create a wasp’s nest of challenges.
Then there is the crushing the baby problem. County planners are already imagining a new commercial core up Belleville Street. Consider a string of strip malls and big-box stores lining the road north of the arena.
I suspect this isn’t what Wellingtonians envision for their community. But by casting our existing core into an undevelopable solid, growing businesses and new investment will surely look to the edge. We must be mindful not to push them there. We must be very careful to ensure the policies we establish to preserve Main Street don’t hollow it out. Like all things in life, this requires a sensitive balance.
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