$500-million project poses questions for city council

08/28/2006

BY MICHAEL-ALLAN MARION
EXPOSITOR STAFF / BRANTFORD

A presentation to be made at a public forum meeting tonight by rising local developer hands city council an excellent opportunity to take a good look at its entire approach to economic development.

Steve Charest, the admittedly brash, impatient young president of King & Benton, will officially unveil the major details of a $500-million commercial and industrial mega-development covering his entire business park on the Oak Park North lands just above Highway 403.

He’s doing that because he wants a public discussion about the benefits of his impressive project to the Brantford area and he hopes council will help staff get in the facilitative spirit to put the finishing touches on getting over some important hurdles.

But more than that, he’d like to begin a serious discussion about how the city should do business with industrial and commercial developers now that the city is running out of municipal land.

More specifically, he wants to discuss how the city should work with developers wanting to bring projects on stream on land the developers own in what is coming to be regarded by both Brantford and Brant County as the prime industrial, commercial and residential growth corridor along Highway 403 and Powerline Road ---- and perhaps as far north as Governor’s Road.
The city and the county have been discussing the area as they try to put together a strategic growth and boundary deal.

THREE YEARS IN THE MAKING

I have watched Charest work on his project since 2003 when he acquired about 450 acres by buying the Nelson Aggregates property ---- a depleted quarry operation straddling Oak Park Road north of the 403.

I have watched him work on his dream one step at a time. I’ve seen the advances, the temporary setbacks, the hurdles and the hoops he’s had to jump through.
Charest made an early mistake by taking the first opportunity that came his way, an $86 million ethanol plant proposed by an area farmer-led co-operative. They planned to build the plant and supply it with water through the dubious proposition of tapping an aquifer in an ecologically sensitive area, rather than hooking up to city services.

Environmentalists hotly opposed it, and gradually council cooled to it.
Once Charest realized his error in judgment, he went to great lengths to correct the matter, while putting together his grand plan to develop the entire acreage as one mega-project. The plan went through several revisions while he negotiated with various corporations of high repute and global reach.

As the pieces of the puzzle began coming together, he worked with some officials at the city and Brant MPP Dave Levac on the infrastructure requirements for such a huge project.
Levac was willing to help him get a larger Highway 403 interchange at Oak Park Road, partly because Levac was already working on a plan to get the Ministry of Transportation to upgrade all the 403 intersections. In Levac’s mind, they were necessary to accommodate the growth that the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing had determined was coming to Brantford and Brant in its Places to Grow and Greater Golden Horseshoe policies.

One question was who would have to pay to upgrade the interchange from its current basic condition to “full build-out status” necessary to handle Oak Park North and the city’s burgeoning Northwest Business Park directly to the south. Even though the transportation ministry and the city have worked out a deal concerning how much the province will pay, the final question of the rest of the money is, unfortunately, still up in the air.

King & Benton has also had to carry out necessary negotiations with the city over water and sewer services, how to extend the pipe under the 403, and the question of development charges. The company’s position in negotiations is that it is willing to build all the infrastructure itself and pay for the pipe to get to its property, but in turn would like development charges foregone. But the final agreements are still not finalized.

So, we have one of the biggest omnibus projects coming to Brantford at the threshold of commencement, but with a lot of unresolved details, and frequent friction from a few councillors and city staff.

That’s certainly not how the city handled the coming of Ferrero, nor how it has dealt with companies that have come to the municipally-owned Northwest and Braneida industrial parks.
Officials bent over backward in the case of Ferrero; and the two industrial parks have been smoothly developed by virtue of well-established protocols and a cosy relationship between the department of economic development, the economic development advisory board and long time players in both parks.

Simply put, the city isn’t accustomed to handling a development of the kind and magnitude of King & Benton’s because it’s used to doing business a different way.

MUNICIPAL BUSINESS PARKS

Most of Brantford’s industrial and commercial development activity has fit into the municipal business park formula, where the city acquires blocks of land, puts in the infrastructure financed by debentures, then devalues the people’s asset by selling the land at dollar store prices with at first no, then lately low, development charges.

The city has allowed a rather small number of developers to buy large chunks of that land at cheap, standardized prices and erect a first building with a minimal 10-to 15-per-cent lot coverage to meet requirements. Then the developer severs the cheap land, builds new plants and sells them for greater profits at its whim.

Councillors Greg Martin, Dan McCreary and Marguerite Ceschi-Smith have been frequent critics of that approach. They maintain either that it’s an inefficient land-use model, or that the citizens aren’t getting value for their money, or that they’re being forced to subsidize development. Unfortunately, those councillors are still in the minority.

The best that can be said for the model is that it was widely followed by municipalities in the 1980s and 1990’s to rebuild their economic bases following devastating recessions, and it has served the purpose reasonably well on those terms.

But now the city is almost out of municipal land, and most developable tracts are in the hands of private enterprise. Yet, the economic development board persists in advancing a policy that the city should always keep a minimum 100 acres of municipal land available to be ready to land A Big One should it bite suddenly. Somehow, according to the logic, deals could not go as smoothly or as quickly on private land.

Really? The Ferrero deal has gone smoother than its chocolate even though it sprung up on private land right beside the municipal northwest park. There’s no reason to suggest that it was an anomaly.

It’s time to face reality. The municipal industrial park model has had its day. It helped Brantford rebuild from the collapse of the late 1980s and 1990s. Now we have entrepreneurs with substantial tracts of land in the city and the county who are willing to risk their money on the future of those municipalities.

Rather than continuing to chase a tired, old strategy, Brantford needs to reorient its economic development policies and retool its staff to become facilitators to help develop the private tracts on agreed rules and protocols.

If done right, the city, private enterprisers like King & Benton and people looking for work will find it a far more rewarding way.