Two city councillors oppose new subdivision in their ward
Rest of council supports Jackson Heights subdivision near Fairbairn Street and Lily Lake Road
The proposed Jackson Heights subdivision of 328 homes in the city’s northwest corner was approved at city hall on Monday, though the two north-end councillors voted against it.
Northcrest Ward councillors Andrew Beamer and Stephen Wright were the only two councillors to vote against the subdivision plan.
The development will be in the Lily Lake planning area, which is expected to have nearly 2,700 new homes across three separate subdivisions over the next few years, with the largest of the three the Lily Lake subdivision of 1,800 homes.
The 328- home Jackson Heights development got preliminary approval on Monday, meaning it still needs a final vote at a council meeting Oct. 26.
Coun. Stephen Wright didn’t like it.
“I support growth when it is the right growth,” he said.
This isn’t the right growth, Wright said, because it’s in the north end where there are fewer places of employment or services such as arenas than elsewhere in Peterborough.
It forces people to get in their vehicles and drive south toward the city’s core, he said, and there aren’t roads to keep ever-increasing volumes of traffic flowing smoothly.
Developing roads and intersections is pricey, Wright noted, and the city is strapped due to lost revenues due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Quite honestly, we just don’t have the money for it (a traffic solution),” Wright said.
The proposed Jackson Heights subdivision would put 328 homes on a 50-acre expanse of vacant land bounded by Fairbairn Street to the east, Lily Lake Road to the north, the planned 1,800-home Lily Lake subdivision to the west and Jackson Park to the south.
A city staff report explains the 328 homes won’t all be of the same type: the subdivision will include 163 single-family houses, 14 units of semi-detached houses, 48 units of townhouses and 103 apartments.
City planning staff recommended approval for Jackson
Heights development because it would finally allow construction on a swath of land first divided into residential lots in the 1960s.
The lands were never developed due to lack of servicing, city subdivision planner Brad Appleby told councillors.
Typically a developer is responsible for pay for the installation of city services, a city staff report explains, but in this case there was never a single developer: instead there were 90 landowners.
But now the owners have banded together to form a corporation called Jackson Heights Developments Inc., Appleby said.
Cavan Monaghan Township Coun. Tim Belch told city councillors his father — a retired surgeon — bought seven lots in the survey in 1965 hoping they’d be developed.
But they never were. Belch told city councillors it would be nice for his father to finally see development on the land “in his sunset years.”
He urged council to at least approve the subdivision plan: “Let’s hope it doesn’t take 50 years to get it developed.”
Heather Sadler, a retired urban planner, said her family also bought property in the survey when she was growing up and it was passed on to her.
Landowners have paid taxes all those years on their properties she said (about $200 annually for her lately) hoping to some day see development.
Sadler said it wasn’t easy to get 90 property owners to incorporate and present a plan to council; she described it as akin to herding cats. And she predicted that if council didn’t approve the plan on Monday the land would never get developed: “It will sit forever.”
Meanwhile, environmental lawyer Ian Attridge asked councillors to look for ways to reduce the impacts on the adjacent valley and woodland, and to protect mature trees in the area.
And two area citizens said they were concerned about how the Jackson Heights development — plus the Lily Lake subdivision and others planned for the north end — will cause endless traffic congestion.
Mitch Bronstein of McCrea Drive in Peterborough said council is putting the cart before the horse if it approves further subdivision plans without first approving solutions to keep the traffic moving.
Coun. Andrew Beamer agreed that 2,700 new homes in the
Lily Lake planning area will mean “a lot of traffic funneling into the north end in the next decade.”
Beamer said traffic congestion is already “the No. 1 issue in Northcrest Ward,” and that solutions will be expensive but critical for the city to see construction on its subdivision plans.
No other councillors spoke or voted against the plan, and none had anything to say in favour of the subdivision either.
Only Coun. Dean Pappas spoke up, asking whether city staff will consider some street names that aren’t “white Anglo-Saxon” for these new subdivisions. Pappas said it’s time to honour more new Canadians in street-naming policies.
“It’s good for the city,” he said, referring to the idea about street names. “I think that’s a positive step forward.”