As I was one of the presenters on behalf of ACO C&EN asking for the Town to designate the Brookside property at last Wednesday's Council meeting, I would like to personally respond to some of the points raised in your post and to some of the comments made by the Mayor and by Planning Director Cristal Laanstra at that meeting.
A note on accuracy: Your report states that three options were presented to Council to vote on, which is not quite true. Only the recommended option 3 was given in the agenda, and that option as written made no reference to designation, only to "engage the landowners...to consider protection of cultural heritage significance on the subject lands". In other words, to ask the landowners to think about it. Designation was only mentioned as a possible goal in the executive summary of the accompanying Staff Report, not in the motion itself. As you will recall, Councillor Mutton had to ask for an amendment to move Option 2 back on to the Agenda.
At Council, the Mayor commented that this decision will likely be appealed to the Ontario Land Tribunal, which is very supportive of landowners, and that any appeal would increase the workload for our Planning staff. We will see what the developer decides to do of course, but I think their chances of successfully appealing this designation have to be weighed against the outstanding cultural heritage value of this property. It would be a difficult task indeed to convince the OTL to overturn the designation of a property that satisfies all nine criteria for heritage designation. I think that the developer's own team of heritage planners and consultants would certainly have been aware of the strong heritage features at Brookside and flagged this likelihood months ago. So it can hardly have come as a surprise that the Town might opt to put some guardrails around the preservation of heritage assets as the planning process moves forward. Also, this same owner is currently developing a site in London, Ontario that has a major designated heritage building on it – the Middlesex County Courthouse. They don't seem to have a problem integrating this building into their development plans, and haven't filed any appeal with the OLT challenging that designation. They should be prepared to work cooperatively within the designation process here in Cobourg as well.
I was puzzled by comments made by Planning Director Laanstra that other planning tools could have been used in preference to designation that would have achieved the same goal. It's true that there are a variety of tools in the town's toolbox that place various limits and requirements on development. But heritage designation is the obvious and accepted tool to use if you wish to protect heritage. If you want to tighten a screw you don't get a nail clipper out to do the job, you select the tool specifically designed for that job – a screwdriver. It is naive to think that continued discussions with the developer, with no firm timelines set, would have actually resulted in any agreement to preserve heritage without designating the property first. The clock, and any options the town had, would have been allowed to run out. Nothing about the notice that Cobourg intends to designate the property prevents the Town from having further productive discussions with the landowner – those will go on anyway. But it may have the effect of focussing those conversations around heritage preservation in a more productive way.
To clarify comments made at the end of your post: The Town will now, after consulting its Heritage Advisory Committee, send notice to the landowner and to the Ontario Heritage Trust of its intent to designate, and the landowner has 30 days to object. If they receive an objection, the Town has 90 days to reply – either to designate or amend. So about 120 days in total to pass a designating bylaw. However, within the 90 day period both parties can agree to extend this period for any amount of time agreed on. They can also mutually agree at any time after the 90 day restriction is triggered that the timeframe does not apply. So there is always time for productive discussion and negotiation.
Ken Forsyth
Editors Note
This letter references Blog Article: Council votes to designate Brookside Property