City declares building surplus for affordable housing plan
A downtown building housing St. Catharines fire prevention officers is being declared surplus by city council and designated for affordable housing.
Councillors sided with the budget standing committee over city staff in making the declaration, which is aimed at putting a dent in Niagara’s affordable housing waiting list by attracting a project to the site.
“We can get the right kind of development there,” Mayor Walter Sendzik said. “There is a great need in our community. This is our opportunity to put our hand up and say, ‘How can we help?’”
Staff were directed to develop a request for proposals to designate the property at 6-8 Academy St., near the bus terminal, as affordable housing.
The 540-square-metre building was built in 1989 and houses nine staff from the fire prevention division of St. Catharines Fire and Emergency Services.
Where they will go now hasn’t been determined.
Dan Dillon, director of transportation and environmental services, wrote in a memorandum to the budget committee on May 16 that it would be premature to declare the property surplus because of costs associated with relocating the fire prevention team.
Employees and their files take up about 180 square metres of space, with the remaining 360 square metres used for corporate file storage. The cost of operating the single-storey brick building is about $30,000 a year.
The memo said if the city wants to keep fire prevention staff downtown, it would have to lease an area that could accommodate the employees, their files and their personal and corporate vehicles, currently parked at the Carlisle Street garage. A lease is estimated to cost about $35,000.
A second option given was to relocate the office to the Geneva Street fire hall. That’s the preference of fire management, but would require significant capital works at the fire hall to accommodate the employees. A dollar figure wasn’t provided.
In the end, councillors sided 9-2 with the budget committee’s recommendation to move forward with declaring the property surplus in the 2019 budget.
St. Patrick’s Coun. Mark Elliott voted against the move saying it would mean significant costs for the city to relocate staff and upgrade facilities.
Beyond that, Elliott said he’s in favour of developing affordable housing in the community but is opposed to seeing concentrations of it in the downtown core where there are already units.
“It’s the responsibility of the entire city to take on the affordable housing needs of our community,” he said.
Port Dalhousie Coun. Carlos Garcia also voted against the motion, as he did at the budget committee, saying the costs were too high and didn’t make sense. He added affordable housing is a regional responsibility and the city already has enough responsibilities that it can’t afford to fulfil.
But St. Patrick’s Coun. Mat Siscoe, the chair of the budget standing committee, said council can’t continue pretend affordable housing is somebody else’s issue.
“There are 11,000 people in Niagara who need affordable housing and the majority of them live in St. Catharines by virtue of it being the only urban centre in the region,” Siscoe said.
“We need to start thinking forward to what this situation will look like in five or 10 years when the waiting list is no longer 11,000 people, it’s 20,000 people.”