mayor says Burlington must shift focus to keep up revenues
Mayor Rick Goldring told the Burlington Chamber of Commerce Thursday the city wants to attract more than 1,500 new jobs a year or 29,000 by 2031.
“Burlington’s era of significant growth and new construction is over, Goldring said. “We are out of land for large new residential subdivisions, and our supply of industrial commercial land is also constrained. We are not on automatic pilot growth anymore. ”
In his speech, Goldring outlined the broad strokes of a new development strategy for the city that ends its reliance on residential assessment growth and outlined the need for provincial help with transit and tax policy.
A key part of the city’s drive, he said, will be redeveloping some commercial-industrial land to make more intense use of the space.
“While the city’s employment lands are valuable strategic assets, they are in limited supply,” he said. “We must take a proactive and targeted approach to preserve and optimize the city’s employment land inventory … making us less reliant on residential property taxes.”
Provincial policies have essentially stopped the outward growth of municipalities. That means old ideas about larger homes and sprawling office developments have to make room for more houses on smaller lots, more condo towers and townhouse projects and more intense use of employment land.
“The theme of our official plan review is growing in place,” he said. “We’re going to retain our urban/rural boundary at Dundas-407 and we’re going to retain 50 per cent rural and 50 per cent urban.
“We all see the benefit of maintaining the 50 per cent rural, but to deal with that we have to look at intensification on the residential side, and then there’s the whole economic development piece as well,” he said.
Without land for new subdivisions of executive homes that come with large property tax bills, Goldring said new assessment in Burlington has fallen from an average growth of 3 per cent over the past decade to less than 1 per cent last year. That means if city services are going to be maintained the only choices are higher taxes for existing residents or new business development that pays higher taxes but consumes fewer services.
Goldring said Burlington’s specific plans call for developing the area of North Service Road between Guelph Line and Appleby Line as “Burlington’s Prosperity Corridor.” The vision is to launch a cycle of reinvestment that will fill the area with over 2 million square feet of new industrial-office space supporting more than 6,000 new jobs.
Across the city the goal is to build more than 900,000 square feet of new industrial/commercial facilities every year. That’s estimated to generate over $600,000 in new tax revenue and create 1,526 jobs a year for a total of 29,000 new jobs across the city by 2031.
Building those offices and plants is only part of the city’s prosperity equation — major transportation changes are needed to ensure people can get to those new jobs. That, to Goldring, means the federal government has to step up and start funding transit projects.
Canada, he said, is one of the few developed countries in the world where the national government doesn’t contribute to public transit, and that’s part of the reason workers in the Greater Toronto Area face some of the longest commute times in North America.
“There is no time to wait on this as the cost of congestion is significant for both commuters and consumers,” he said.
So far, the Ontario government has committed to widening existing highways, but that’s only a partial solution — what’s really needed is for Ontario to “aggressively” support the $50 billion Big Move infrastructure plan by Metrolinx, a plan supporters say could cut up to 32 minutes off average commuting times in the GTA. So far the province has only committed $16 billion.
The Big Move calls for the addition of more than 1,200 kilometres of rapid transit projects in the GTA. That would more than triple current capacity and mean over 80 per cent of residents in the region will live within two kilometres of rapid transit.
Goldring also called for changes to a tax system he said is unfair to municipalities.
“There is real unfairness about a tax system that sees municipalities receiving 11 per cent of tax revenue generated along with maintaining 65 per cent of the capital infrastructure,” he said. “Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion has said many times that the federal government has all the money, the province has all the power and the municipalities have all the problems.”
The Hamilton Spectator, January 25, 2013
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