Hello Ward 8 Neighbours,
In a unanimous vote, City Council called for the return of 3,000 acres of Hamilton land that encapsulated the area’s portion of the Greenbelt.
For more details, please continue reading below…
Councillor John-Paul Danko introduced the motion at Council’s most recent meeting.
The motion, in which the City formally requests the reinstatement of the City’s Greenbelt lands back to the Greenbelt, was passed unanimously. Council is also asking every municipality in Ontario where Greenbelt lands are slated for development to request their return as well.
As Councillor Danko put it at the last council meeting, Ontario residents have “lost trust” in Ford and his Progressive Conservatives, as the Spec observed.
“In my opinion, the only way for Premier Ford to regain that trust is to abandon these plans to develop the Greenbelt”, Danko would go on to add.
As the Hamilton Spectator has covered extensively these past few weeks, Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk’s 93-page probe into the province’s removal of 7,400 acres from the two-million-acre protected zone found numerous faults with the exercise.
The audit found that the Ford government’s process was rushed, politicized, secretive, ignored key concerns such as environmental and fiscal impacts, and was “biased in favour of certain developers”.
The Auditor General also found that the owners of the parcels of land pulled from the Greenbelt could see those properties collectively increase in value, estimated at over $8 billion.
The premier has rejected calls to reverse the Greenbelt removals, insisting that the land is needed to meet the province’s housing goals.
Hamilton’s housing goals
Councillor Danko, meanwhile, stated via the Spec that Hamilton has its own plan to meet the province’s assigned goals of 47,000 units by 2031.
The City’s planning committee approved 1,658 additional residential units, which is about 35 per cent of the annual target in one meeting, Danko said.
That adds to the roughly 37,000 residential units staff said were already at various stages of approval earlier this year.
Questions or concerns?
If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact our office here.