Over the next 10 years, Springwater Township is going to experience phenomenal growth — most of it in and around the village of Midhurst, just north of Barrie.
The growth may be so great, in fact, that another ward could be added in Springwater to ensure population parity in all township wards, a goal of the current ward boundary review that is being done by Watson and Associates Economists.
According to Jack Ammendolia, managing partner at Watson and Associates, the concentration of growth in Midhurst makes it difficult to create a plan that maintains parity today and also well into the future.
“The important part is the concentration of growth,” Ammendolia said Tuesday during one of the two ward boundary review public information sessions Springwater Township hosted at its administration centre.
“Sometimes you work in a municipality that has four communities that are going to grow at an equal rate, so the parity can work for longer. In this case, the growth is concentrated in one spot," he added. “There’s no system I can give you that’s going to be OK in ‘24 and OK in ‘34."
Ammendolia said his goal is to create a solution that reflects what’s most important to the people who live in Springwater Township.
“What we want to know from the public is ‘what is acceptable?'"
He laid out the choices: Play catch-up and fix the system for the 2026 election, monitor growth and do another ward boundary review in 10 years, or build a system in terms of what Springwater will look like in the future and grow into it.
“The reality is, we look at the guiding principles, which are not all aligned with each other, and a lot of these things are in tension with each other,” Ammendolia said. “When you start to fix one thing, something else falls a little more out of balance.”
Tuesday’s public information session featured three options Watson and Associates had developed.
Option one, Ammendolia explained, looks at the 2024 population only.
“We know things are going to happen in the future but we’re only going to look at 2024,” he said. “When we look at it, it works for 2024 but it doesn’t work for the future.”
Option two, he said, still has a couple of issues, but should work for the 2026 election and probably the 2030 election, too.
By 2034, Ammendolia thinks the township will experience the same issues it’s experiencing now.
“When you start to look at what does work for the future, option three really starts to focus more on the 2030, 2034 populations, but you lose a bit in 2034,” he added.
Ammendolia said he and his team looked at the existing system and concluded some of it works from a community of interest perspective — because villages in each ward have connections and similarities — but from a population parity perspective, “it’s really out of whack.”
Currently, Ward 4 stands out like a sore thumb.
While the other four wards have total populations between 3,890 and 4,750 people, Ward 4 has 7,660 residents.
According to Ammendolia, the system works best when all wards are within 25 per cent, plus or minus, of the ward average.
By 2034, if the ward boundaries are kept as is, Ward 4 will grow to almost 13,000 residents and Ward 5 will grow to about 11,500. The remaining wards will have populations between 4,500 and 5,500.
“As the municipality grows, everything falls out of balance,” Ammendolia said.
In option one, after the ward boundaries are modified, the 2034 population variance between wards is negligible, with wards having between 3,440 and 5,510 residents each.
By 2034, Ward 5’s population will be almost 18,000 — almost three times the population of the next largest ward, Ward 1 which will have about 6,200 residents. The other three wards will have populations of between 4,650 and 5,690 residents.
In option two, after the boundaries are readjusted, the population variance between wards is almost non-existent, as each ward has between 4,180 and 5,500 residents.
By 2034, Ward 3’s population will be almost 12,000 residents, 33 per cent higher than the next most populated, Ward 5, which will have about 9,000 residents. The remaining wards will have between 5,500 and 7,000 residents.
In option three, after the boundaries are moved, Ward 3 will be home to 3,200 residents, well below the ward average of almost 5,000 residents.
By 2034, Ward 5’s population will be almost 11,000, about 2,000 residents more than Ward 3 and more than 3,000 residents in each of the remaining wards.
Watson and Associates will draft final recommendations for council’s consideration in December.
Residents who missed the public information sessions can still make their voices heard by clicking here to visit Springwater Township’s ward boundary review page.
