The province has requested Barrie and Oro-Medonte officials work together to solve boundary, industrial development and employment issues, says Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall.
“The minister of municipal affairs and housing has asked that Oro-Medonte work with the city, and we have formally extended the offer to the Township of Oro-Medonte, to return to the table to find a local solution,” Nuttall said Tuesday in a media release.
“This is not about what’s best for Barrie — it’s about what’s best for our region," he added. "Creating the future we all want for our children and grandchildren requires us to think beyond lines on a map. Decisions must be made based on what is right for the entire region.”
The city issued a news release late Tuesday morning highlighting poll results which indicate a "majority of Barrie-area residents support boundary expansion."
However, the poll was not commissioned by the city, but rather by Mainstreet Research and first published by iPolitics/QP Briefing late Monday night.
Oro-Medonte Mayor Randy Greenlaw questioned the timing of the poll results, as many local politicians are at the Rural Ontario Municipal Association (ROMA) conference in Toronto.
“Barrie’s mayor waited until everyone in the county that had a stake in this was out of town at ROMA when he put it out,” he told BarrieToday.
“At the end of the day, we don’t want to negotiate this in the press, and that’s what Barrie’s mayor is doing," Greenlaw added.
Nuttall appeared before the province's standing committee on heritage, infrastructure and cultural policy, regarding the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing’s study on regional governance, on Nov. 6 to make the case for Barrie’s boundary expansion for industrial development — plans for a combined 2,200 hectares in both townships.
Barrie could provide for 20,000 industrial, manufacturing and warehousing jobs during the next 20 years if it could work out a deal to use neighbouring land, Nuttall has said.
But by mid-November, after Nuttall also made presentations to councillors from both townships, Springwater council voted unanimously to terminate discussions with Barrie about the city’s proposal for boundary adjustments and decided to send a letter to the ministry saying talks on the matter were finished.
Oro-Medonte’s council has also said it’s not comfortable with Barrie’s request for land.
In the city’s Dec. 6 recommendations for its new Official Plan (OP), which designates land use, to Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra, Nuttall said that as Barrie grows, there needs to be a sufficient amount of jobs to accompany the housing growth.
Barrie city council pledged to build 23,000 new residential units by 2031 as part of Bill 23, the province’s More Homes Built Faster Act of 2022, which calls for 1.5 million new homes built in Ontario, again by 2031.
But Greenlaw says there is more to it than just land.
“This is not a land issue; it’s a funding issue,” he said. “Fourteen years after annexing the Innisfil lands, Barrie hasn’t put the infrastructure in the ground. Why should we bail them out for making poor decisions?”
The city says a new poll by Mainstreet Research shows 73 per cent of Barrie-area residents support the city having sufficient land supply to attract new investments by major industry, while 77 per cent support allowing local manufacturers to expand locally, rather than move elsewhere.
“Barrie has been one of the fastest-growing cities in the country for decades and we have the servicing and the ability to get this done,” Nuttall said in the release. “We need serviced employment lands to help our businesses to continue to grow and prosper and to create high-paying jobs for our region.”
The polling also showed 65.5 per cent of Oro-Medonte residents support ensuring Barrie has enough land to spur industrial growth, the city says, including 38.8 per cent who strongly back the move.
Greenlaw said he had caught wind of the poll.
“I was aware Mainstreet was doing this poll as I got a number of calls from Oro-Medonte residents last Thursday when I was coming back from our presentation to Minister Calandra,” he said.
“My understanding, from what the residents I talked to told me, was that the questions Mainstreet asked were so general in nature that it didn’t have any value," Greenlaw added. "The questions were not specific to Barrie’s annexation. They asked question like, ‘Do you think Barrie should have affordable housing?’”
The city says the survey also found 83 per cent of respondents support Nuttall’s efforts to bring more high-paying jobs to the area, while 60 per cent said the city doesn’t have a sufficient supply of well-paying jobs.
The automated telephone poll, conducted between Jan. 18 and 19, asked 742 Barrie and Oro-Medonte residents for their thoughts on local development and economic issues. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 3.6 per cent at the 95 per cent confidence level.
— With files from Wayne Doyle
