Three fully fledged campaign policies, my pal chatGPT has produced a chart comparing all of the policies laid out by the Candidates. OK for the anti AI people the input I used was “compare the platforms of Nicole Beatty, Lucas Cleveland and Max LeMarchant” check the results click on the image!  For the full details of the platforms check them out for yourselves: for Nicole click here, for Lucas click here and for Max click here.

I guess the rest of the details for me was to check a couple of contretemps laid out on social media in the last few days. One was the fact that the Land Acknowledgement was not read out at the September 16th Council Meeting. Apparently the Mayor, following his usual practise of not reading the Land Acknowledgement himself, as other Chairs of Meetings do (what is wrong with this guy not doing this leads to people thinking he has something against it) asked if there were others on Council who would read it. Some people saw a couple of Councillors raise their hands as volunteers but the Mayor did not recognise them so the Council started their meeting without a Land Acknowledgement. The first time this has happened since the Council adopted the protocol. Social media exploded and many are asking Why the Mayor refuses to read it.

But the biggie for the BR, the second part of the contretemps was the Planning Meeting and the reaction to it (on the Cobourg News and Social media).

Thanks to jetlag I was up very early giving us time to review the video today. Opinion is divided about the conduct and demeanours of the Speakers depending on your bias and point of view. For the strong opinions and the lovefest check out the other blog.  But the meeting wasn’t about who said what, but what they said. Starting the presentation the Consultant for the Developer and his other team workers, a Traffic Consultant and a Heritage Consultant spoke to Council for one hour and thirteen minutes but their presentations can be boiled down to a couple of sentences: “We will provide the housing that people want” and “The extra heights will pay for the development.” This acknowledges the fact that the Brook Creek is a major problem for anybody who wants to build on that site. “Heritage is fluid” was another comment to register, this comment came in answer to Cllr. Mutton’s worries that the Heritage Stables may be demolished, even though the building is designated. Developers’ Heritage planners think that Heritage can be commemorated by a plaque or keeping a facade on another building. Cllr Mutton disagrees and so do we at the BurdReport.

On to the speakers. Far fewer than I thought would be there as some, down the list, withdrew saying their points had been covered by the first speakers. It should be noted that the Mayor’s comments to speakers and his questions to speakers that were designed to make political points were noted with points of order at least three times. But the speakers points that impressed us came from a couple of excellent presentations. One was from the consultant to the Developers at 545 King who had been sitting on a patch of land zoned for a grocery store and just now, after a couple of decades broke ground two months ago. The consultant raised the fact that the application was incomplete because a required Retail Study had not been submitted and if the commercial capacity was granted then their application would be affected in a big way. The same point – the application being  incomplete was raised earlier by Cllr. Mutton when she pointed out that the Brook Creek study from the GRCA was not in the application. At that point the Mayor accused her of accusing the Staff of Professional Misconduct – it was that kind of a meeting!

Another was from a very informed speaker – Susan Abel – who argued that this application was the wrong kind of housing for the wrong market of people. Using StatsCan figures she pointed out that the population of Cobourg had barely increased in the last four years. Also pointing out that the median age of the population has moved from 54 years to 64 years in as many years, “More than half the population is over 65 – this is a retirement community, we should be building for them, intensify by small one storey buildings” as she showed a slide of the Densmore Rd  condos superimposed on the applicants vision, replacing planned ‘stacked townhouses’.

Local historian, Rob Mikel, representing the local ACO, produced a letter from from a renowned Heritage planning legal company that defined the huge historical position of the Stables and went to great lengths explaining the need to preserve the Stables. The Mayor responded to Mr. Mikel’s submission with derogatory remarks and had to be admonished by Cllr. Mutton. If you have facebook watch the exchange the Mayor berate Mr. Mikel here

Cindy Beman, a candidate in this election but an advocate for low income housing for decades came to tell the meeting that low income housing can be incorporated into the development  and the Town should get involved too. This seemed to set the Mayor on a rebuttal that was so offensive that he was again reminded that he was out of order. Watch the exchange on Facebook here.

Another nearby resident appealed to the Council not to allow this application, if approved, to be a twenty-year project. “I don’t want to live next to a building site” something that had not really been considered before

The highlight of the meeting, if one was grading the event, was the submission made by Max Lemarchant, al local builder with years of experience dealing with planning and its problems when administered by a department that he deemed to be rushing the application. This in the end was admitted by the Director of Development, Mr. Challenger, but justified in the timing of an election. Max pointed out the process of public involvement was flawed because of the lack of meaningful input available to the Citizens. However in the exchange it was obvious that as Mr. LeMarchant is a fellow Mayoral candidate that tension was in the air. In the exchange the Mayor pointed out again, as as had done many times in the meeting, that if Council had voted as he did (the only vote to do so) in the motion to designate the Buildings on the Brookside site, we would not be arguing about the heights of the building in the application but negotiating them down. As always the Mayor wanted to justify himself as the only person who seemed to know what was right. In the end the Mayor stated he agreed that the process is flawed but seemed to disagree on anything else that Max had said.

One of the final speakers spoke about the problems of living near the Brook Creek and the sporadic problems of uncontrollable flooding and pointed out that is could only get worse with unregulated development upstream. Which is a major point as the report from the GRCA, which is needed to comment on the application, is not in the package even though Mr Challenger has deemed the package complete.

At the close of the meeting the CAO was asked to suggest ways that the Council could involve the public in future public discussion about this application. Outlining some of the ways, which included the Council calling for further meetings and asking the public to participate. Most were convinced that this application will take more than the 120 days needed to complete the process to avoid an appeal the Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT) and Council was in favour of that.

So an eventful time while the BR was away, we await further developments!