New construction in Chatham-Kent will see costs rise when hooking up to municipal water and sewer infrastructure.
Chatham-Kent council voted in favour of the new by-law at Monday night's council meeting.
The changes came from the Chatham-Kent Public Utilities Commission (CK PUC) and would see development charge (DC) increases phased in over a five-year period.
Industrial, commercial, and institutional costs would go from $3.51 per square foot to $8.30 per square foot.
Residential costs would rise based on the number of bedrooms, with the costs for an average one-bedroom or semi-detached home going from $6,711 to $11,515.
For new greenhouses, a growing industry in Chatham-Kent, DCs for water and wastewater which total $0.36 per square foot would rise to $12.74 in 2029.
"To be honest, we heard from these guys last week and they said if we do this, they'll never build a greenhouse in Chatham-Kent... what's our response to that?" Ward 6 Councillor Michael Bondy asked bluntly.
"There are other avenues for greenhouses to irrigate themselves," Darren Galbraith, General Manager of the CK PUC replied. "There's wells, if they can find a large production well, there's also surface water. The Public Utilities Commission is not the only source of water for them."
Galbraith added a clarification to the by-law, saying that any development that has CK PUC approval to provide its own water and wastewater services will be exempt from the new DCs.
"I don't think there's an option to not accept these DC's," said Ward 1 Councillor Lauren Anderson.
"I think that we've gone back-and-forth and back-and-forth and ultimately any development that were to happen with the previous DCs would fall on the ratepayer, and I'm not happy to offload that onto ratepayers at this point and likely not in the future either," she added.
While she can't fathom pushing costs onto CK taxpayers, the idea of losing out of greenhouse growers and the jobs and food security they could provide prompted Anderson to add her own amendment to the by-law.
The amendment reads as follows:
That a working group be formed with invitations extended to the PUC, Natural Gas providers, Hydro providers, appropriate Municipality of Chatham-Kent staff, Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers representatives, and Greenhouse Stakeholders with Letters to local MPPs and MPs for their attendance at and participation in such working group that will meet monthly, or as this group deems necessary, to discuss and troubleshoot various challenges and advantages to Greenhouse Development in Chatham-Kent.
Anderson has already been in conversation with local representatives of the provincial and federal governments to explain why their involvement in this issue is necessary.
"There's been a lot of responsibilities put on the municipality that were historically provincial, with really no increase in budget to accommodate that. That has gotten us into a situation where we now have significant infrastructure upgrades that are needed to accommodate growth that citizens can't possibly afford, nor can the municipality. And more funding is needed if such growth is wanted by the province, which it is," Anderson said of her discussion with MPP Trevor Jones.
"The conversation that I was able to have with MP Dave Epp, it was kind of the same question of how does the federal government have a responsibility in this," Anderson described. "My response to that was, the immigration policy put forth by the federal government is to double the population of Canada by the year 2050 and if that's the case we not only need infrastructure to accommodate that growth, but we also need jobs for them. That needs to come from the top down and there's no way that a municipality can take on those additional costs."
She concluded that this infrastructure issue, especially in the case of greenhouse development, needs "everybody at the table, in order to come up with ideas, so we can move forward."
Anderson's by-law amendment passed unanimously.
The rest of the by-law, which was split into two pieces, passed with a vote of 14-4.