
Image: Town of Paris circa 1990, by bbjenkins
This the first in Steve’s series of posts about his Priorities.
People who have lived here for decades and people who just moved here have one distinct thing in common: they all tell me they are frustrated with the rapid growth of our Town. My response is always the same: “I understand completely!”. It’s tough seeing houses being built where we used to climb trees or where we would ride our bikes through cornfields.
I first experienced this when I was about ten years old in the mid 1970’s in Ward 2, north of Silver Street, and residential development has certainly ramped up quite dramatically since then. If there was a switch to turn off residential growth, it would be tempting indeed. Unfortunately, that is truly impossible.
Here is some context:
Two months into my first term as a Councillor, in January 2019, our Council received a presentation from the head of our Planning Department. The gist of his message was to make sure that we were aware that as of that date, there were already 5400 residential dwelling applications in the pipeline, at various stages of approval or appeal, and these numbers are almost entirely in Paris. I put my hand up and asked: How many dwellings does Paris have now (150 years into its lifespan)? Somebody on staff had to look it up, but the answer was around 5377. This means that without looking at any further applications, the County already had enough in the pipeline to double the size of the Town. We all recognized that this was far from ideal, and that’s when we adopted the “Tap the Brakes” approach to any new applications.
The reality is that we can’t tap the brakes forever. The Province requires us to grow from a County population of 40,000 to almost 60000 (The Paris portion works out to growing from 14,400 to almost 27,000). Those are startling real life numbers, but the good news is that the Province doesn’t require us to achieve that growth overnight. The timeline they provided is 30 years. We could keep the brakes on for a long time and still hit that mandated growth target well before the deadline.
While we cannot stop residential growth, one of the strategies the County has been working on to manage the growth (and particularly Paris) is our New Official Plan. This will be the guidebook that informs decisions that are made over the next several years. Staff listened to residents, businesses and looked at what other municipalities are doing, and our New Official Plan includes a lot of details and tactics to help us manage the growth of our community. As of right now, despite the fact that we were one of the first Municipalities to submit our Draft Official Plan for review and acceptance, the Province has yet to approve our Plan.