{"id":24561,"date":"2019-08-29T16:42:43","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T20:42:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=24561"},"modified":"2019-09-05T19:32:18","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T23:32:18","slug":"planning-questions-went-unanswered-at-conference-says-mayor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/planning-questions-went-unanswered-at-conference-says-mayor\/","title":{"rendered":"Planning questions went unanswered at conference, says Mayor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

Last week\u2019s Association of Municipalities of Ontario\nconference brought lawmakers from the Provincial and Municipal levels together\nto brainstorm ideas, share success stories, and press the Province on local\nissues, and Aurora came away from the table with some wins and losses,\naccording to Mayor Tom Mrakas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going into last week\u2019s meeting, which was held in Ottawa,\nMayor and Council had a number of items on their to-do list, including\nadvocating for municipalities to have a greater day in local planning decisions\nand improving access to Highway 404.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tackling the first issue, Mayor Mrakas says he was\ninterested to hear from Premier Doug Ford that the Province should \u201cget out of\nthe way of municipalities\u201d and allow them to govern themselves. This, says\nMayor Mrakas, was a positive and welcome message, but one that has not\ntranslated to policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s great he feels that way, but I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve\nseen that yet,\u201d Mayor Mrakas tells The Auroran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This can be seen primarily in the Progressive\nConservative government\u2019s passage of Bill 108, which rolls back changes made by\nthe previous Liberal Government to nix the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) in\nfavour of a Local Planning Appeals Tribunal (LPAT). Bill 108, passed earlier\nthis year, retains LPAT but restores to it many of the powers previously held\nby the OMB that were of primary concern to local municipalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf they truly mean that (about getting out of the way of\nmunicipalities) and they are moving in a different direction where they are\ngoing to get out of our way and let us govern, that\u2019s great to hear, but I\nhaven\u2019t seen it,\u201d says Mayor Mrakas. \u201cThey shouldn\u2019t get out of the way, but\nthey should sit down and work with us; that means having proper consultations,\nmeetings, sitting down with us and hearing what is happening at the grassroots\nlevel. That\u2019s a better approach than just to say, \u2018We\u2019re going to get out of\nyour way.\u2019 It\u2019s about working together and I think everyone understands that we\nneed to do that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe problem with hearing the Premier saying that, it is\nfunny because Bill 108 basically stripped municipalities of the authority of\ndeciding how we grow our communities. The question was asked (of Steve Clark,\nMinister of Municipal Affairs and Housing), \u2018You\u2019re going to go back to a\nflawed system, one that strips the authority from municipal Councils. Why are\nyou doing that?\u2019 It is unfortunate that the answer wasn\u2019t really there and the\nanswer the Minister gave was, \u2018Well, judge me in a year\u2019s time. Come back and\nsee how it works and judge me in a year\u2019s time.\u2019 He didn\u2019t really give us a\nfull answer on why he wanted to go back to the flawed system and why he thought\nthat was the right thing to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI can guarantee\u2026 a lot of the OMB Reform Working Group\nare going to come back here in a year\u2019s time and judge him. I think the\nresidents of our community, York Region, the GTA and right across the Province\nare going to judge him as well. When it comes to planning in our communities,\nwe\u2019re all about making sure there is not over-development in our communities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Members of Aurora Council were also left without firm\nanswers when it comes to Highway 404 and Aurora\u2019s long-sought interchange with\nthe 404 at St. John\u2019s Sideroad. Mayor Mrakas says he was hoping to get a chance\nto sit down with Caroline Mulroney, Minister of Transportation, at the\nConference but, as that didn\u2019t happen, he is hoping to line up a meeting in the\nnear future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want to [stress] the importance of having that\ninterchange at St. John\u2019s and Highway 404 and the need to have that to relieve\nsome of the traffic situations we\u2019re going to be dealing with as Newmarket and\nAurora continue to grow, and even north from us continues to grow,\u201d he says.\n\u201cIt is something that was very big on our plates to get out there and let the\nProvince know it is something that they need to move forward with. They have\nmoved forward with the subway coming up north, but there are other things they\nneed to look at from a traffic perspective to make sure that all areas in the\nnorth don\u2019t get forgotten and they just deal with the southern part of York\nRegion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, there were some concrete positives to come out of\nthe Conference. One such positive that will impact Aurora, says Mayor Mrakas,\nis the Province\u2019s commitment to open up funding for cultural and recreational\ninitiatives in concert with Federal programs to cover new cultural and\nrecreational builds, such as Library Square.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is important to us, from an Aurora perspective,\nbecause it has to do with the funding that we\u2019re looking for for Library\nSquare,\u201d says Mayor Mrakas. \u201cThat\u2019s an exciting announcement to hear the\nProvincial Government is going to open up and allow for those applications to\nstart coming in. That was part of the holdup with the Federal part of the\nfunding we\u2019re looking to get for Library Square. We were all concerned it\nwasn\u2019t going to be opened up until after the Federal election, but they decided\nto do that September 3, so staff are already prepared to put in the application\non the Provincial side and our application is already in on the Federal side.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Town is hoping to secure $14 million in funding,\nsplit evenly between the Federal and Provincial levels of government, to help\nmake the Library Square project a reality.<\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conference with Provincial leaders, however, brought welcome news for Library Square redevelopment: Mrakas <\/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-24561","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\/p3D2k4-6o9","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-10 07:28:37","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\/24561","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=24561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}