Another Ontario Municipal Board Appeal Won

On the 10th of August, the Board gave approval for the residential development project at the corner of Tyler and Yonge.

The town's decision was not upheld.

The issue was parking . The project now has the go ahead. Without going into the records, I'd say that's probably six months of the construction season wasted.

Six months of employment that didn't happen.

Hours of legal and planning staff time occupied at the town hall, with no useful outcome.

The project could have been underway and enclosed before the snow flies. They may start now but the delay has been useless and costly and will not be recovered.

Completion will be six months delayed. Six months of assessment revenue will be lost.

How many more small businesses in the core will go under that might have survived with the spark of walk- in trade from a new residential building in the central area.

What have we learned? Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Nada... Nil...Zilch ... Zero

We have the Fol-de-Rol Promenade Study by the Mormac Cult, complete with airy-fairy fanciful pictures and notions of what might be, apropos of none of the reality that for anything to happen in the core, we are entirely dependent on a partnership with the private sector's investment and ingenuity .

Meanwhile, we spend thousands of dollars , and time defending decisions that prove to be indefensible at the Municipal Board. We cause months of delay and waste of optimum construction time. Real projects funded with private investment languish on draughtsman's boards awaiting the signal.

We add staff to the administration to stimulate economic development.What a joke.

Remember the Mayor's expedition from her office with staff taking photos of blighted sites to display on the overhead at televised Council meetings complete with critical admonitions to owners to clean up their act.

Owners who have repeatedly run the gauntlet of the tortuous public planning process again and again with a kaleidoscope of plans to meet the economically impossible ideas of a group , who may never have built as much as a tree house or financed anything but a residential mortgage but are supremely confident of their competence to spot flaws in whatever comes before them and continually marvel at their own acumen.

Just look at the record:

All those failed extravagant legal processes to obtain a consolidated board hearing , doomed from the start because the board never did have the authority to grant .

Piggy backing neighbours opposition on to ours with their lawyer and their witnesses. Doubling public expense to oppose the Westhill application to develop land that has a Town of Aurora Official Plan designation to develop. While our best and only hope is to ensure the municipality's interest is protected now and in the future.

The application for the North -east corner of Centre and Yonge has never gone to an OMB appeal because the nature of the site makes it completely dependent on a zoning compromise which in the entire period of this term of office has been willfully refused.

This October, it will be a year since we have had an application for development. Public Planning Meetings have been cancelled because there were no applications to be heard.

We know about the economic downturn. It could be that. Or it could most likely be absolute futility in trying.

We are an urban municipality. Our future as a community where everyone can afford to keep their homes, is dependent on viable growth which keeps taxes at a manageable level.

It can be done.

If that is our objective..