{"id":20799,"date":"2018-05-31T11:53:50","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T15:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=20799"},"modified":"2018-05-31T11:53:50","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T15:53:50","slug":"council-rejects-abels-call-for-armoury-business-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/council-rejects-abels-call-for-armoury-business-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Council rejects Abel\u2019s call for Armoury business case"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

A case stating the economic benefits of converting the historic Aurora Armoury into a campus of Niagara College\u2019s Canadian Food & Wine Institute has one again been rejected by Council.
\nCouncil members voted 6 \u2013 2 to reject renewed calls from Councillor John Abel for an economic impact analysis of Aurora\u2019s deal with Niagara College which, he said, should show the public the economic offshoots such a deal will bring to the Town.
\n\u201cI think it is important coming out of 18 months of closed session [that] the public should be aware of the social and economic benefits,\u201d Councillor Abel told the rest of Council, taking aim at Aurora going it alone with out additional partners, including funding from the Province. \u201cI think it is important that if we\u2019re going to say post-secondary has economic and social benefits, that we understand what they are.\u201d
\n\u201cWe\u2019re not in a position to sink millions and millions into post-secondary unless we have the Province,\u201d he continued. \u201cThe Province requires an investment strategy and it has to do an economic analysis before you can apply for them to consider. If you don\u2019t have that, it is not a business model they are even interested in looking at. If we\u2019re going to\u2026take this route and make this investment, we should understand what those impact benefits are that we talk about. Primarily, the spin-off economic [benefits] are the activities associated with the students.
\n\u201cWe have to understand that if there are benefits, the long-runs are with income tax from people who graduate and graduates from culinary wouldn\u2019t be able to afford to stay in Aurora. We won\u2019t see those economic impacts and that is why it is important we bring this forward so our citizens understand what kind of investment we\u2019re making.\u201d
\nMost Council members, however, said the information is already out there \u2013 including Councillor Harold Kim who said while an Economic Impact Analysis is \u201cuseful in many cases\u201d he was unsure he wanted to \u201cput in staff time\u2026because these types of impact analysis reports are already out there.\u201d Citing examples of how a post-secondary presence has acted as a \u201cboost\u201d for other communities, he said he felt the same would come from the Canadian Food & Wine Institute (CFWI).
\n\u201cI don\u2019t see how a culinary institute would be that much different,\u201d he said. \u201cI am fine with the Institute locating here with the positive impacts I see.\u201d
\nCouncillor Michael Thompson shared the viewpoint that the information has been brought home time and again. Councillor Thompson said he and Councillor Abel were both on Aurora\u2019s post-secondary working group which first focused on bringing a \u201cFab Lab\u201d to the old Library building, now demolished, on Victoria Street, and then re-focused again on trying to attract York University\u2019s new campus to both Aurora and Newmarket.
\n\u201cOver that time, staff have always come to us and talked about the economic benefits and the community benefits of attracting a post-secondary institution,\u201d said Councillor Thompson, asking CAO Doug Nadorozny whether municipal staff did their \u201cdue diligence\u201d on examining the economic impacts of the CFWI deal.
\n\u201cWe assumed the non-spreadsheet benefits of having the institution in this community were of [interest] to Council and the community,\u201d responded the CAO. \u201cIt was on that basis that we started off with an economic level. That work was done on a more general level on post-secondary education and its value to the communities. From that point on, our negotiations with Niagara College, as this Council is aware, was based on the actual American model that we saw appropriate level of investment for the return that we get over the full term of the lease that spoke more to the dollar costs and not subject the Town to excessive amounts of subsidy to get that post-secondary institution here in the community.\u201d
\nMayor Geoff Dawe, on the other hand, the only Council member to vote in favour of Councillor Abel\u2019s motion, said the responsibility for due diligence falls on Council.
\n\u201cDoes our Council feel that due diligence occurred? I would say yes,\u201d said Mayor Dawe, supporting Councillor Thompson\u2019s view that if any analysis were to occur, it should be carried out by a third party, rather than have municipal staff turn it around in 28 days as originally suggested in the motion. \u201cI think we have looked at it very carefully over the last six or seven years.\u201d
\nCouncillor Jeff Thom was also of the view that \u201cevery single Councillor\u201d did their due diligence on the Armoury \u2013 and that includes looking at the economic benefits. He agreed, however, with suggestions made earlier in the evening that a report carried out by a third party would provide a good \u201cbaseline\u201d to measure these impacts.
\n\u201cWe made our individual decisions based on what we thought was the best interests of the Town, the community and included in that was the economic impact,\u201d said Councillor Thom. \u201cAs has been stated, if we want to track this project over the term of the lease in order to look at how we can improve on the lease moving forward\u2026as this progresses, I think that is something worth looking into and certainly will take longer than two meeting cycles to complete.
\n\u201cCouncillor Abel has just outlined why \u2013 and he voted against the project \u2013 reiterated why he voted against it and, in my opinion, this is not an attempt to get the Economic Impacts, but to further drag out the process so that\u2026 he has another opportunity to talk about why he is against the project. We have moved forward with this and I certainly believe it is in the economic interests of the Town and will have benefits for our Town. Certainly I am in totally in favour of tracking that progress, but I don\u2019t think that is the intent of this motion. I think the intent of this motion is for Councillor Abel to, quite frankly, continue to grandstand on this issue.\u201d
\nThis accusation of \u201cgrandstanding\u201d promoted a Question of Personal Privilege from Councillor Abel objecting to the term, a complaint upheld by Mayor Dawe. Nevertheless, Councillor Abel persisted with his argument.
\n\u201cWe talk about what these benefits are, but nobody can specifically say what they are. We should have had this,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is we\u2019re adding 1,400 square feet to the Armoury and we haven\u2019t even seen what we\u2019re going to net. It looks like we\u2019re going to net 3,000 square feet. In my mind, we\u2019re not gaining anything socially, we\u2019re losing on a great, valuable space. I think what would be fair to the public is knowing exactly what we have done. The only way to do it is with a third party.
\n\u201cThese are very common and they are used to convince policy makers and they are used to convince the public on why you would make such an investment. I think it would only be fair since we didn\u2019t have a steering committee and we didn\u2019t have an investment strategy and we didn\u2019t partner with the province, which is a mandatory, and we don\u2019t know what their program development is, we should at least let the public know what we have done and this is a very easy tool to use.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A case stating the economic benefits of converting the historic Aurora Armoury into a campus of Niagara College\u2019s Canadian Food & Wine Institute has one again been rejected by Council. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5pt","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-28 05:19:45","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}