Possible template for school closures
The Glen Ridge School saga is about to get a lot more interesting. You know the tale, right? District School Board of Niagara closed the venerable St. Catharines school last year, leaving the vacant property in one of the city’s most established and cohesive neighbourhoods open to all sorts of possibilities.
A community group was quickly formed in a bid to ensure neighbourhood residents had a voice in how the site was developed.
Give the group full marks for creativity and reasonableness.
Its top priority was to retain a significant portion of the property as parkland, an amenity the school had provided for 90 years. To achieve this goal, the group recognized it had to make the required land purchase financially palatable to the city.
So, it suggested the city buy the entire 0.88-hectare site, keep onethird of it as a park and sell the remainder, including the building, to a third party, most likely a residential developer.
At this point, a lot of taxpayers living outside Old Glenridge would normally start to shudder.
Rightly or wrongly, there’s a perception out there, as noted by Coun. Bill Phillips, that the city “has in the past bought high and sold low.”
The Glenridge group proposed a process that would guard against such an outcome.
The city would get the property appraised and then solicit bids through a request for offers document prior to concluding any deal with the school board.
Tom Richardson, a lawyer with considerable municipal expertise and a Glenridge resident, told council at a recent meeting that knowing what offers it has for the developable portions of the property will allow the city “to assess whether it is going to make sufficient money to justify the onethird for parkland.”
City council rightly decided this is a strategy worth exploring.
Indeed, it could establish a template for similar school closings in greenspace-bereft neighbourhoods, a possibility that has not escaped the minds of ward councillors throughout St. Catharines.
Now, though, comes the hard part, or at least the unknown.
The best-case scenario would go something like this:
The appraised market value of the property would be, say, $2 million.
The city receives, through its RFO document, a number of bids for the developable portions of land, topping out at $1.5 million. The planned development is judged reasonable by both the city and the neighbourhood. The net cost for the park would then be $500,000, which wouldn’t be a catastrophic drain on the city’s park fund or set a financially foolish precedent for similar situations in the future.
A less-favourable scenario would see few bids submitted, with a complete lack of interest in buying the school building, which has been designated a heritage property.
The top bid for the parcel of property that does not include the building comes in at, I don’t know, $700,000 or so, and neighbourhood residents see the proposed development as too high-density. That works out to a $1.3-million parkland purchase and a potentially nasty fight between the city and the community over the type of housing being planned for the site.
Plus, the city could be stuck owning a heritage building, with presumably high renovation and maintenance costs.
In words that could come back to haunt him, ward Coun. Joe Kushner assured his colleagues during the Glen Ridge School discussion earlier this month “the last thing this council wants would be the responsibility of another heritage building.”
Let the nasty politicking begin.
But that’s the hopefully very pessimistic view. This is a strategy definitely worth attempting, and the Glenridge community group should be commended for devising it.
I also think the majority of city councillors want this to work, believing their turn to help preserve a neighbourhood amenity could come next.
Bring on those boffo offers.