South Dundas council has a monumental decision to make soon regarding the Morrisburg and Iroquois village plazas – one that has implications for everyone who lives in the municipality. Who is going to pay for the renewal of the infrastructure at the plazas?
At a recent meeting, council heard several options for how to pay for the millions in updates required at the plazas. Those include common ownership by the businesses, the sale of the common areas to another party, and municipal ownership retained, with business property owners having a special rate levy added to their taxes. Another option is to have all taxpayers in South Dundas share in the burden, no differently than how the extensive park system is funded.
The decision-making power of council is already impaired on this issue, as two-fifths of council – Mayor Jason Broad and Councillor Cole Vienotte – have declared a conflict of interest. Both cannot participate in the discussion. Councillor Danielle Ward has advocated for the businesses to pay for the infrastructure. That logic is valid, as the businesses benefit from the common spaces at the plazas, including parking. While logical, is it fair to those business property owners? No.
As the readers are frequently reminded in this paper and other publications, the situation with the plazas and much of our modern infrastructure in Iroquois and Morrisburg are the direct result of the 1950s St. Lawrence Seaway mega project. This project was a federal and provincial project, with town and village infrastructure falling on the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario.
Work completed by HEPCO, later Ontario Hydro, was shoddily done. In fact, for nearly a decade after, villages like Morrisburg had to fight with the province for repairs and upgrades to substandard work. HEPCO was to look after the common areas – including the plaza areas and the parking lots. That slowly passed to the village governments, which eventually became South Dundas and South Stormont. It was through neglect by the province on its commitment to these areas that were disrupted by this grand project that the municipalities came to own the common spaces. Renovations in the 1990s and 2000s led to South Dundas owning the canopy areas of the plazas as well.
The degradation of the Morrisburg and Iroquois plazas comes from deferred maintenance by successive councils, including the current one which has preferred to study issues rather than acting on them. Having the property owners in the plaza pay a special levy for plaza-specific infrastructure would place an unfair burden on those owners, who will in turn have to raise rents to tenants, and that leads to increased costs which will be borne by customers. Another cost that many businesses can ill afford in these uncertain economic times.
The plaza parking lots and common areas are in a sense an urban park. Parks are for everyone, and paid by all taxpayers. Funding should be provided by the federal or provincial governments to address historical neglect of their responsibilities to this area for the project they disrupted the region with. In lieu of that the cost of the plazas should be borne by all taxpayers in South Dundas, not just select property owners. To do otherwise invites special levies for park areas in each area of the municipality – a bad precedent to set for sure.
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