Old Highway 11 won’t have a new owner.
Innisfil council voted unanimously not to sell the road allowance to Bujan Pardis and his company PACIFIC Inc.
The company owns the property at 5567 Yonge St., home of the former Barclay Square restaurant. Pardis has plans to convert the property into a larger commercial space with several quick-service restaurants and feels ownership of Old Highway 11 is essential to its success.
The redevelopment of the property is currently working its way through the town’s planning process and the site plan application was deemed complete in January.
The matter was brought to council at its June meeting but deferred as Coun. Fred Drodge, who represents the ward the property is in, was absent at that meeting.
Drodge didn’t use the delay to offer a rousing argument against the plans. Instead, that opportunity was taken to full advantage by two neighbours and one former councillor who argued passionately in opposition to the proposed sale.
John Trotter has lived on property adjacent to Old Highway 11 nearly as long as the Town of Innisfil has owned the road. The access points to his farm have been there longer than he has, he suggested, and are not trivial. While some are not used as often as others, they provide vital access for he and other farmers utilizing the land.
The sale of Old Highway 11 would limit his autonomy and hinder the farming activities in the area.
“It is a childish argument to say that I should just use other driveways,” Trotter said. “This is my property. These are my driveways. I should decide when and how to use them.”
Trotter also argued his property values would decrease — as much as 30 per cent — by losing frontage onto a right-of-way, and scoffed at the suggestion made by consultants retained by Pardis that sales at his gas station would improve.
“It’s another example of the crass nature of this proposal,” Trotter said. “I am the expert in how my business works … and I can state that no evidence exists to support this.”
Elisa Di Giambattista followed Trotter in opposition to the sale. She and her husband owned Barclay Square for 29 years and disagreed with how the new owner of the property had previously characterized it.
“You have been told at the last meeting that the business wasn’t financially viable,” she said. “Only because of my Lupus illness and my husband passing from cancer, that two-and-a-half years later I made the hard decision to sell. Indeed, (if my husband) didn’t pass away and I didn’t have Lupus, I’m sure my family would still be proud owners of this wonderful historical establishment.”
Di Giambattista told councillors she had been opposed to the sale of Old Highway 11 since she first caught wind of it. Still living adjacent to 5567 Yonge St., she feared her driveway would transform into a commercial parking lot if the sale was approved.
She said the proposed plan was not well thought out.
“If this five-drive-thru and Old Highway 11 sale goes forward, my home would effectively have a commercial driveway in front of it due to the volume of traffic it might attract,” she said. “This would be a burden on myself and my family who would have to deal with this situation.”
Trotter and Di Giambattista also took umbrage with the state of the property since Pardis bought it.
“The developer has left the property in poor-to-rundown condition and in some years, it’s been completely abandoned,” Trotter said.
“He chose to be an absentee landlord,” Di Giambattista said. “The property has suffered from this ownership and has, to say the least, gone drastically downhill.”
Ex-Ward 7 Coun. Rob Nicol also provided a delegation to council. Given the town’s land disposal policies and the proposal’s history, he wondered why the sale was even being entertained.
“This was already dealt with, at least twice by myself and also once by former Coun. Richard Simpson,” Nicol said.
He felt the staff report provided was “misleading,” and didn’t give councillors an accurate representation of what’s happened with this file over the past decade, including an indication there were no objections when the idea was first floated in 2015.
“That’s incorrect,” Nicol said. “Myself and the abutting property owners all expressed real concerns and to my knowledge, it was dealt with then.”
A subsequent attempt in 2020 was also met with similar contempt, Nicol added.
Pardis provided a delegation to councillors at the June 26 meeting, when the item was deferred. The recording of that meeting was circulated to councillors prior to the Aug. 14 meeting to refresh them on his comments. He was also given the opportunity to speak again prior to council’s debate on the staff report.
Pardis says his proposal will benefit the entire Innisfil community, as he looks to redevelop the property and bring in new business that can serve residents and visitors alike.
He suggested council needs to act for the benefit of the whole, not the few.
“I want them to have objective, reliable, scientific information in order to make a right decision to the interest of the entire population of Innisfil, not the three individuals who expressed their personal interest,” Pardis said. “A council decision should rely on the entire interest of the town.”
If councillors voted against the proposed sale, he argued, it would be on them to explain to their constituents why they were adding to their tax burden to repair a road used by so few residents, when it could be transferred to private interests.
Staff estimate rehabilitation of the road would cost approximately $210,000 if retained and added to the roads rehabilitation program, although through the delegations, there was some question if any money has been spent on the road since it was a provincial highway.
The town has owned Old Highway 11 since 1956, when it was bypassed by a new road alignment, represented in the current route of Simcoe County Road 4 (Yonge Street). The road had first been assumed as Highway 11 by the Ontario Department of Highways in 1920, as part of the creation of the provincial highway system.
The road’s history in the municipality dates back a century prior to provincial assumption, being surveyed in the aftermath of the War of 1812.
After denying the purchase, council received the staff report on the matter for information with no further direction.
