By Pepper Parr
November 8th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
During a delegation to City Council earlier this week Daintry Klein, the spokesperson for Millcroft Greenspace Alliance said the following.
The highlighted words were added by a Gazette reader
The words highlighted were added by the person who sent the material to us.
Daintry Klein: “City is within its legal right to own this natural infrastructure with or without a willing seller”. Really?
Klein clearly doesn’t understand what the city can and cannot do when it comes to expropriating property.
When a responsible citizen states that the “City is within its legal right to own this natural infrastructure with or without a willing seller” you begin to wonder how much power any municipality should have. Klein is just plain wrong
The Regional government is buying up properties in the Beachway on a willing seller and a willing buyer basis – they understand that owning property has certain rights that are not easily trampled on.
There is an infrastructure in place that moves rain water to the pond.
One Gazette reader took this to mean that “MGA wants the city to expropriate the Millcroft Golf Course lands. Is it a stretch to say expropriation can be used for flood mitigation.
Some might see the MGA continued efforts to save the flood abatement infrastructure as worthy – that matter is a closed. The Premier is not going to issue a Ministerial Zoning Order (MZO) especially after the Ontario Land Tribunal found in favour of the developer.
There were conditions attached to the OLT decsion – MGA might want to focus on those conditions to save as much as they can.
We respect that everyone is entitled to their opinion but the Municipal Act is clear on expropriation. The subdivision agreement of 1986 for the “Rose subdivision” was very clear that the golf course land has creeks embedded in the fairways and that this land shall be permanent open space whether the golf course discontinues its operations or not.
Should the development proceed, the new homeowners on the Millcroft floodplain will be responsible for privately owned (condominium style) stormwater storage tanks required as part of the development approval process that must be maintained at their expense. They will also be responsible in the event that the tanks fail. Buyer beware!
The City is facing major flooding issues due to its topography and greenspace is an important mitigation factor. The cost to the City of flood response must be addressed with mitigation as clearly set out in federal and provincial reports.
We also note that the Millcroft Golf Course has always and continues to be zoned as Major Parks and Open Space. The City had identified protecting the natural environment as a priority and the existing decades old trees and greenspace represent part of that natural environment.
Just our opinion! The fight to preserve the land as Major Parks and Open Space continues.
daintryklein thank you for this comment. There are other applications where members of the public other than ourselves have publicly commented on the neighborhood safety issues of applications. One being the Molinaro Plan A on the corner of Brant and Ghent. (Due diligence we live next door). There have been delays in the application one due to Halton Conservation identified issues and one being the moving of the UGC and MTSA from downtown to this corner.
Correspondence is available from the Ministry to the Region Chair and MMW that shows MTSA’s are to be focussed along subway lines and priority transit corridors which the corners of Brant and Ghent are not. Our mutiple efforts to determine if the Mayor ever provided this April 2020 letter to Council have failed and are now with the City Clerk to verify. It is the developers who want it there to support their height and depth plans regardless of the safety issues now known to be connected to such that were not generally known when this application began..
Without warning to those who live within Planning Act required notice area and without a second statutory public meeting this application was approved with some “secret” requirements of the developer and city. The Ward 2 councillor moved the motion despite “Stick to the Plan” members public objections to approve the Application for this corner and ignoring the flood mitigation and spill hazard concerns with the removal of the last patch of grass on the four corners of Brant and Ghent and the surrounding neighborhood.
We believe the City should be expropriating this corner if nothing else and putting back the trees (we have a photo of all the stumps that were left after the tree annhialation from a very long time ago. We did not have the guts to pubkiucly suggest expropriation until hearing your recent delegation and reading this comment. Thanks again.