Airport development numbers don’t add up
The age-old battle that pits sprawl against the environment is growing tiresome, but change seems to be in the air.
In 2021, Stop Sprawl HamOnt launched a well-organized citizen campaign against expanding Hamilton’s urban boundary with a simple call to action: save farmland. Faced with rising pressure to act, council sent out a survey asking residents what they thought. Amazingly, 16,636 respondents (over 90 per cent) demanded a firm urban boundary.
Then, the unheard-of happened. After supporting sprawl for decades — in part because of the decision to house the economic development and planning functions in the same department, which other cities, such as London, Ont., don’t do — Hamilton’s council voted to hold the line on the urban boundary.
But our sprawl-related decisions aren’t over.
Job-poor, automated warehouses are proposed for the Airport Employment Growth District (AEGD), a 555-hectare piece of land formerly known as the Aerotropolis and bounded by Upper James, Garner Road, Twenty Road and Highway 6.
This is an area rich in wetlands (75 per cent of which have been lost across southern Ontario), significant wildlife species and farmland. As the highest point of land between lakes Ontario and Erie, it’s also where four watercourses spring forth: the Welland River, Twenty Mile Creek, Ancaster Creek and Tiffany Creek.
The AEGD doesn’t fare well under financial scrutiny. The road network alone is pegged at $500 million. In May 2022, the cost of a very short stretch (10 kilometres) of trunk sewer on Dickenson Road to service the AEGD spiked from $73 million to $108 million.
To be fair, some of the costs will be covered by developers, but that may change as council has been asked to consider a 37 per cent discount in development charges for the AEGD lands — a shortfall which must be made up by taxpayers. Plus, the developers won’t be around when this infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. Our children — and theirs — will be entirely on the hook for those costs.
Roads and sewers are only a small sampling of the infrastructure investments required to service the AEGD in readiness for development. At the same time, Hamilton labours under an unprecedented city-wide yearly infrastructure deficit of $195 million. In early April, council learned of an additional $41-million annual funding gap for other asset classes, including the fire department and library.
The AEGD is not inevitable. Council can attract much-needed property taxes and jobs by redeveloping industrial lands, such as McMaster Innovation Park (the former Camco plant) and the Steelport lands on the bay. Redevelopment provides high quality jobs, cleans up contaminated brownfield sites, adds public open space and saves taxpayers money by using existing infrastructure, including highways, rail lines, city roads and our busy port.
The social licence that allowed urban sprawl to become the dominant form of development in Hamilton over the past 60 years is in its final days. A new community land ethic is emerging. The first sign was the decision to maintain the urban boundary. A year later, council created the Office of Climate Change Initiatives. It’s expected to approve the Biodiversity Action Plan shortly.
Do we mortgage our future to build AEGD, or do we let the natural assets already there continue to store flood waters, feed streams and provide habitat for wildlife, as they have done for millennia?
What choice would you make?