Jennifer Smith

One of the great things about being a member of the Milton Choristers is that we get to participate in so many community events.  From caroling at Allendale and the Hospital tree-lighting to singing 'O Canada' at local hockey games, we get to give back to the community in many ways - and do what we love doing at the same time!

Today we got to sing the national anthem - plus a few numbers from our most recent concert - at the annual Halton Multiculturalism Day Picnic at Bronte Creek Park. The event is organized by the Halton Multicultural Council, an organization which promotes tolerance and cultural education, as well as offering vital settlement services to the rapidly growing number of new Canadians who call Halton home.

The picnic itself is a lot of fun. It's a great chance to sample food, music and crafts from around the world, and to get to know some of our new neighbours.

Too bad Rick Day wasn't there. He might have learned something.

It was another packed house at the Administration and Planning Committee meeting on Monday. Most of the crowd was there for the first official public meeting regarding the proposed Milton Heights development proposal, although there were several other items of interest discussed.

I blogged about Milton Heights a few weeks ago after attending one of a series of 'unofficial' public meetings held by the landowners group and the planners they've hired, but Monday's meeting was the first time their proposal has been brought before council. No decisions were made, but the concerns of the residents were heard loud and clear.

Those concerns mainly centre around density and traffic.  When development was first approved for the area as part of the Sherwood Survey back in 2004, the plan was for a very low density of 15 units per hectare.  But then changes in regional and provincial policy removed large areas from consideration due to environmental concerns and Greenbelt and Natural Heritage System designations, as well as sustainability policies encouraging higher density development and intensification.  And so a request is now before council to change the overall density from 15 to 40 units per hectare, which is more like a village model than the large lot estates originally envisioned.

While a few residents objected to this new density target, many more were upset about the potential traffic chaos caused, not by the new development per se, but by the new Tremaine/401 interchange. While visitors to Kelso and Country Heritage Park currently cause enough of a back up coming up from the south along Tremaine, the new interchange would bring even more of them from the north and east along 3rd Sideroad - right past new and existing homes.

The developers claim that the traffic impact would be "minimal" - an extraordinary claim based on their own traffic study (conducted, inexplicably, during weekday rush hours instead of weekends during ski season), and on the rather circuitous route they will encourage motorists to take through the area.

Happily, there are many, many steps to be taken from now to when the shovels hit the ground.  Many of those steps will be taken by the new council, which will obviously be making some changes to the plan presented by the developers group.

My main concern will be that we don't throw the baby out with the bath water. As I said in my previous post, the tertiary plan is generally excellent, with many innovative features that should be emulated elsewhere in town, and I would fight to make sure those features aren't sacrificed while we fix the deficiencies.

In other news...

- There was a proposal to extend by-law enforcement hours of operation during evenings and weekends. This will apparently be more difficult than it sounds since the added hours wouldn't quite justify the hiring of an additional by-law officer, but would require some rather expensive overtime hours.  Still, not a huge expense  - about $12,000 for what will be a valuable added service to residents.

- In amongst a list of 'housekeeping' zoning by-law adjustments, a recommendation to more strictly define what a 'bank' is in the downtown core. Current zoning prohibits 'offices' on the main floor of what are supposed to be retail shops on Main Street - the idea being to keep it a vibrant, pedestrian oriented shopping district.  Banks are allowed, but the existing definition also included 'financial offices' which could include mortgage brokers, financial advisors, etc. This change would put those under prohibited first storey office uses.

- During the Budget Committee meeting, staff reported that while the Province is claiming that the new HST will be revenue-neutral for municipalities, their calculations indicate that it will cost the Town as much as $200,000 a year. Ouch.

- Colin Best mentioned that St. Paul's had submitted their demolition request. The matter will now go before Heritage Milton at their next meeting on July 8th.  We can expect alternate proposals to be presented by a number of parties, and if those are rejected by the church there may well be a recommendation for Heritage designation to protect the sanctuary.

- Eleanor Hayward from Milton Green made a presentation on the group's proposed 'Zero Waste' initiative, which would have Town Hall and other town facilities lead by example by aiming to reduce their waste to zero through increased recycling, green bin use, elimination of disposable plastic water bottles and non-recyclable packaging, and purchase of things like compostable plates and cups.  Markham has already implemented a Zero Waste policy with great success, and Oakville and Burlington are looking into it as well.

I'll definitely be adding that one to my "To-Do" list.

As I go from door to door, speaking to the people of Ward 2 and listening to their concerns, one question I always dread is, "What do you think should be done about St. Paul's United Church?"

It's a bit like being asked what I think should be done about Palestine.

I've been advised by many sensible people to stay away from this issue entirely. In fact, I suspect my campaign advisor just went a little grey as she read the title of this post. Unfortunately, things are starting to come to a head now, and people are not likely to stop asking me about it any time soon.

If you aren't aware, St. Paul's has been having problems with its roof. At some point in the building's 120 year history, somebody decided to replace the roof shingles with slates - possibly to keep up with the fancy Anglican Church up the street. The problem is, the roof was never designed to bear that much weight, and over the decades those heavy slates have been slowly deforming not only the roof but the walls as well. If you go in today, you will see steel pillars supporting the roof and fencing outside to prevent passers-by from being clocked by falling slates.

Oh, and it leaks.

Just how bad the damage is and how much it would cost to repair depends on who you talk to. From what I understand just replacing the roof would cost up to half a million, and I've seen estimates of anywhere from $1.8 million to nearly double that to bring the whole building up to any basic standard of structural safety and accessibility.

That's a huge financial burden, especially for a building that no longer meets their needs. And so, last year, the congregation took a vote and the majority decided on a plan to tear down most or all of the existing building, build a new, more modern and usable church facility, and add a multi-storey 'life-lease' seniors condominium building, similar to the Marian Courtyard at Holy Rosary.



This decision, while it makes perfect sense for the congregation of St. Paul's in many ways, would also result in the loss of a major historical landmark on Main Street. Not surprisingly, this inspired local heritage organizations and many members of St. Paul's to start a petition to 'Save the Sanctuary', and to ask Heritage Milton to designate it as a heritage building to prevent it from being demolished.  The Town decided to defer that decision to see if a compromise solution could be reached.

That was last summer.  Yesterday, the Champion reported that St. Paul's has voted to formally request permission from the town to demolish the sanctuary and the attached community / education building.


So here goes...

My answer is, I don't have an answer.

I know that's not going to win me any support, and I'm sure it sounds like I'm waffling, but it's also the simple truth. While I would consider the demolition of St. Paul's a tragic loss that would wound our community in ways I can't imagine, I can also sympathize with the members of St. Paul's who want to modernize their church and take all the money currently spent on endless repairs and maintenance and put it to use doing good works in the community.

Of course, I don't have all the facts. I haven't read the engineers' reports (either of them), I haven't seen the architect's plans, and I don't know what the congregation's finances are like. I have asked those involved with both sides of the debate to send me supporting documents, but even with those I suspect I would remain torn.

Ultimately, I'm not terribly interested in picking a side. As with all things, I am far more interested in solving the problem, for both the town and the congregation of St. Paul's.  So while I support the church's designation as a heritage building (because it is), that cannot be the only thing the Town does.  Preventing the demolition without some form of financial commitment doesn't get the building fixed and doesn't solve the problem for the congregation.

Similarly, building a condo development on the site at a height that would be economically viable (I've heard a minimum of 6 storeys) would require some pretty elaborate zoning variances which would require the consent of residents in the neighbourhood. I cannot imagine a scenario where that would ever happen, and any re-development without the condos wouldn't solve the problem either.

And so the dilemma remains.

I still can't tell you what the answer is, but I can tell you that letting this descend into an adversarial situation cannot possibly help. We would all like to find a way to leave St. Paul's standing. We would all like the church congregation to be able to thrive and do their good works in a safe, accessible, usable facility. It may not be possible to achieve both those objectives in a way that satisfies everyone, but if there is a solution it will only be found by remembering that a church isn't just a building - it's also a community of people.


I know that's not much of an answer, but at least it's an honest one.

(photos from the Milton Historical Society archives)

It seems that almost all of my fellow candidates were at the Milton Street Festival this weekend. I've attended Street Fest before - even sang there once - and it's a fantastic event, thanks largely to the efforts of Donna Danielli and a veritable army of volunteers.

I was not at the Milton Street Festival this year. Instead, I was at the other festival happening in Milton this weekend: the Country Renaissance Festival up at Country Heritage Park.

Some of you may remember the old Ontario Renaissance Festival out by Derry and Trafalgar that ran for nine seasons before it shut down six years ago. My husband and I both had merchants' booths there from year one, selling everything from soaps to wooden games and leather costume accessories, and we did very well - so well that we lost nearly half of our annual income when the show was shut down.  Other merchants and cast members lost nearly everything.

Happily, that experience led to my husband developing a successful career in film props and wardrobe, and to my becoming (among other things) a semi-professional singer with an a cappella group that performs at events like the Country Renaissance Festival.

Which is why I wasn't at the Milton Street Festival.

If you had no idea that this other event was gong on this weekend, you're probably not alone.  There are all sorts of events that take place in and around Milton every year that don't get the sort of publicity and promotion they could use. Even the Ontario Renaissance Festival seemed to get very little promotion by the Town even though it attracted tens of thousands of people every summer, employed over 300 people directly plus the independent merchants and their staff, and was supposed to be a "signature event" for Milton.

There are all sorts of reasons for this, including different treatments of for-profit and non-profit events in terms of government funding.  However, it is always in the best interest of local municipalities to promote any and all events that might attract tourists.  Annual events and local attractions not only bring people and their money into the area, they also bring local jobs (especially for youth), and business for local suppliers, restaurants, hotels, B&Bs, etc.

But without a common promotional strategy, these events and attractions are left to promote themselves individually in a very crowded field, or even end up competing with one another like these two festivals did this weekend.

The Town of Milton has pretty much left it's tourism industry up to Halton Region and the Milton Chamber of Commerce to manage.  That was fine when we were still a small town, and the Chamber has certainly done an admirable job with things like their Escarpment Country initiative.  But Halton has to balance the needs of all its municipalities, and the Chamber has plenty to do already without having to worry about playing tour guide.

I believe the time has come for Milton to start defining itself as a unique tourist destination just as Burlington and Oakville do, with an independent, dedicated tourism organization that would work with all stakeholders - public and private - to develop a centralized, coordinated local tourism strategy.

In the meantime, here are a few more images from the Country Renaissance Festival:

I'm not the only candidate who has been talking about speeding, road safety, and other local traffic issues lately.  Zeeshan Hamid over in Ward 8 has written some excellent posts on traffic and traffic calming measures, largely drawn from his experience living in various towns and cities in the U.S.

I thought I'd check to see what other mid-sized communities in Ontario are doing in this regard.  And lo and behold, I discovered this:

This publicly accessible document details a clearly defined procedure for quantifying traffic issues, identifying those areas that would benefit from traffic calming measures, establishing a hierarchy of measures that could be implemented, and scheduling follow-up studies to see if they're working.

Compare this to the Town of Milton's approach when residents of Woodward Ave. expressed concern about speeding on their street last year:

Traffic Calming

Presently, the Town of Milton doesn’t have a traffic calming policy in place or a traffic calming capital budget. Traffic calming fundamentally deals with the reduction of adverse impacts of motor vehicles on built-up areas. Primarily, it involves slowing the speed or reducing the volume of vehicular traffic on neighbourhood streets to increase safety and livability of a neighbourhood.

Traffic calming measures are usually applied on local residential roads. Traffic calming is not recommended for roads with a primary function of carrying high volume traffic such as arterial and collector roads. As Woodward Avenue is classified as a collector road, it would not warrant traffic calming.

There are several things I find curious about this report when comparing it to the policies in Caledon - besides the fact that we don't have a policy.  One is the statement that traffic calming measures are not recommended for collector roads such as Woodward, Commercial, Scott, etc.  Really? According to who? Because the Town(ship) of Caledon seems to feel that collector roads are perfect places for traffic calming as long as they are appropriate to traffic volume.

Another curiosity is the difference in the warrants when it comes to speeding.  These are generally based on speed studies which determine both the average speed and the 85th percentile speed (i.e. the speed which 85% of the vehicles travel below).

Although Milton's warrants don't seem to be publicly available anywhere that I have been able to find, whatever they are, no street ever seems to qualify.  For example, the 85th percentile speed for some sections of Woodward was 63 kph, which is 13 kph above the speed limit.  Similar results were found for north Commercial Street when they did a study here, even though the posted limit was 40 kph.  And yet in both cases, these results were deemed "acceptable".

In Caledon, an "acceptable" 85% speed is defined as 10 kph over the posted limit. Anything above that warrants an investigation into traffic calming measures.

Warrants are important for making consistent and unbiased decisions regarding speed limits, stop signs, crosswalks, etc.  But it is equally important that the warrants themselves be reasonable, accessible to the public, and integrated into a coherent traffic management and traffic calming policy.  Such a policy would not only give the public a better understanding of the reasoning behind these decisions, but would provide them with a specific process to bring their concerns forward without having to find a motivated advocate on council.

Most importantly, a traffic calming policy like the one in Caledon would actually solve problems instead of just identifying them by giving our town staff a hierarchy of real, effective options for traffic calming - besides just saying no to unnecessary 4-way stop signs.

Most people think of Ward 2 as the central core of old Milton, but there's another region of this ward that many people tend to forget.  North of Steeles, around the intersection of Tremaine Road and 3rd Sideroad/Peru Road is Milton Heights, a semi-rural enclave consisting of a church, a corner store, and a few dozen houses.

You've probably driven through it on your way to Kelso, or to the Country Heritage Park. That's where I attended a meeting last week of local residents, landowners, and the company that has been tasked with designing a new housing development in and around Milton Heights.

And you thought development was just an issue in the 'new' wards!

I won't speak to the relative wisdom of accelerating this project, or of releasing these lands for development in the first place.  As with the developments south of town, these are decisions that were made many years ago, and despite what some people are being led to believe, there is nothing any of us can do about it at this point.  Residents can demand changes to the plan, they could even conceivably delay things, but sooner or later Milton Heights will be developed.

That said, as housing developments go, this one looks pretty good.  To start with, all that added traffic won't be plowing through the middle of the existing settlement along Tremaine Road because the north end of Tremaine is going to be redirected to the east and connected to the 401 (tentatively slated for 2013), leaving 'old' Tremaine as a quiet rural road.

Meanwhile, Third Line will be expanded as a collector road for the new neighbourhood - but (get this) the developers will be intentionally keeping the road narrow and adding 'bumpouts' and other traffic calming measures to keep speeding down. Compare this approach to the mess at Scott Blvd.



There are a lot of other features in this proposal that show a great deal of promise.  Things like orienting streets to maximize views of the escarpment, putting garages in the back instead of the front, facing homes onto parklands, planting trees early so they will be more mature when people move in, integrating a variety of different housing forms into each street - all of the most progressive ideas in urban design.


How many of these features actually make it into the final streetscape is another matter because unfortunately, these things are largely left up to the developer and not the town.  In this instance, we might actually see it happen because such features are regarded as bonuses that can draw premium prices for semi-rural homes like these. But for developments like the Boyne Survey south of town, the results could well end up looking more like our worst notions of suburban sprawl because the Town only supports or recommends these things instead of mandating them.

I won't speculate on why so many Councillors seem to prefer this sort of 'hands-off' approach, but I assure you that I do not. We can't stop development in Milton at this late date, but we can control and shape it - in the new developments as well as in the re-development of the existing urban area.

Of course the Town isn't in the business of designing and building homes, and certainly the most creative and progressive ideas in urban design are going to come from architects and developers, not our Town staff or councillors.  But through the application of stringent engineering and design standards, pre-zoning, bonusing, and other tools in the municipal tool box, we can make sure that developers are using the best of those ideas to create communities that we can be proud of for decades to come.

We just need the political will to do it.