Where the new development will be located is getting clearer - not downtown.

By Pepper Parr

April 6th, 2021

BURLINGTON, ON

Another one of those weeks.

Council meets for three days in a row as Standing Committee. This is where all the grinding takes place. Recommendations come out of a Standing Committee, then they go to Council where they are voted upon and become the bylaws of the city.

It isn’t quite that smooth – but on balance as a process it works.

Planners from the Region were on hand to today to talk about the growth plans for the Region and what that is going to mean for the city.

The Region is required to grow from a population of 595,000 to 1.1 million by 2051.

Just where they will live and where will they work were the issues driving a very in-depth, detailed study that Region Planner Curt Benson took council through this morning.

THAT is complex stuff.

One of the reports set out what the boundaries are going to be for the MTSA – Major Transit Stagnation Areas, which for Burlington are going to be located at the GO station.

There will be three MTSA’s in Burlington.  Besides the Burlington GO there will be one at Aldershot GO and Appleby GO.

The boundaries are quite a bit bigger than many people thought they were going to be.

The transit terminal on John Street is not among the MTSA’s – it will remain a bus stop, albeit a busy one, nothing more.

The Urban Growth Centre got moved north – many said it couldn’t be done. The boundary is pretty clear in this illustration.

The boundary for the Urban Growth Centre shifted a little as well.

The battle to put an end to the high rise towers has basically been one.

There are concerns about three developments – the CORE development that sits inside the football between Lakeshore Road and Old Lakeshore Road and the Carnacelli development planned for the east end of the football as well as a second Carnacelli development on the north side of Lakeshore Road at Pearl.  Those are battles that fall outside the limits of the Urban Growth Boundary.

The plans to tear down the Waterfront Hotel and put high rise structures in that space has yet to come to the table.

When it does the Plan B people who live in the downtown core have a solution.

Those are battles that are sometime in the future – perhaps as much as a decade.

The objective was to ensure that the view south to the lake from Brant Street was unobstructed. The Waterfront Hotel would come down and new buildings would be built in what is now the Waterfront parking lot.