$812,000 jobs subsidy goes to Orléans kiddie playland
Amount for Orléans project expected to total $812,000 over 10 years
A city subsidy program meant to boost high-tech knowledge jobs in Orléans is helping to pay for a new indoor playground and daycare.
The subsidy, through forgiven property taxes and other rebates, is expected to amount to $812,000 over 10 years. This is one of three projects the city has approved so far under an Orléans economic-development program it launched in 2013, and the only one with an actual business attached to it yet. Though the playground isn’t open yet — the operator expects that’ll happen this summer, a year behind its original schedule — the other two projects the city is funding are for professional offices being built on spec, in the hope occupants will come.
The playground at 1290 Trim Rd. is an eastern version of Kanata’s Kids Kingdom, with multiple levels of climbers and slides and other fun things for children to charge around in. It’ll include an 82-spot daycare and probably summer daycamps.
“It was a great proposal. We don’t have anything like that in all of Orléans. We have 120,000 people, don’t have anything like that. It creates new jobs, it’s great for the economy, it’s great for the community,” says Orléans Coun. Bob Monette, who fully supported the decision last year to give the business the money through a thing called the Orléans Community Improvement Plan (CIP).
“Basically, there’s a daycare that’s part of it. There’s also administrative positions that are part of it. You’d have to check through the whole report and they’d identify the jobs that are part of it,” Monette said. The report recommending the subsidy, which city council unanimously approved, just says that 20 of an anticipated 35 jobs will be “knowledge-based.”
“As far as I’m concerned that’s what the CIP is all about, is to encourage new jobs in our community,” Monette said.
The guy behind the Kanata Kids Kingdom, Frank D’Amato, is also building the one in the east. I couldn’t reach him on his cellphone Tuesday, but you can’t fault a person for taking advantage of free money if the city’s offering it.
The project is formally owned by a numbered company, 2405012 Ontario Inc., which gave Monette the maximum $750 allowed under law for his last re-election campaign. Also completely legit.
Orléans actually has two such programs. The other one is dedicated to tidying up St. Joseph Boulevard. It has helped to fund a new Farm Boy store that was already built, a retirement residence that would have been built anyway, and a Tim Hortons in a parking lot. There’s also one for a dilapidated stretch of Carling Avenue, for which zero applications have ever been received — a failure of a different sort.
The point of this one, as city council approved it, is “to encourage and facilitate development and redevelopment of properties providing knowledgebased employment in Orléans.” Specifically, it was after “highpotential growth industry sectors, particularly high-potential and emerging industry sectors such as film, television and digital media as well as knowledgebased industries which include wireless, photonics, clean tech, aerospace and defence, and life sciences.”
But buried in the list of hightech industries that qualify under the program is “Community, social and personal services including health and education services,” and the daycare will have early-childhood educators, so that’s how it’s eligible. The way preschool educators are paid in private centres in Ontario, the $81,200 a year from the city will probably cover the cost of two full-time jobs with a little left over.
Early-childhood education is profoundly important in a cosmic sense, but it’s not an economic driver in the way the subsidy program imagines. Nobody gets a great daycare innovation to market, files a couple of patents, founds a spinoff daycare, lands a big Montessori contract, and starts hiring child-psychology PhDs from India for the R&D department. Kanata was built on defence and telephony research, not social services.
Cumberland Coun. Stephen Blais, whose ward includes a lot of Orléans, says he understands other applications are in the works for a site on Innes Road, several near Place d’Orléans, and more at Tenth Line and Highway 174.
The first depends on whether the builder can put together a case for enough jobs. The others depend on settling the city’s light-rail plans for the east end.
Once we’ve spent several hundred million dollars on train lines and stations there, of course we’ll be ready to pay landowners to put offices next to them.
Makes as much sense as any of this.