Town committee calls for boundary expansion

Jeff Helsdon, Editor

The town’s Economic Development Advisory Committee is advising council to increase its allotment for institutional/commercial land from 15 to 30 per cent, which would require a boundary expansion to facilitate it.

Jesse Goossens, chair of the Economic Development Advisory Committee, spoke at the Sept. 22 council meeting to explain the committee’s recommendations. Oxford County is currently updating a study to forecast growth and land needs for the next 30 years. The committee reviewed the draft findings of the study at its meeting on September 9. As a result, the committee saw a shortage of commercial and institutional land.

Committee members reached the conclusion there was a shortage based on:

• The demand for commercial space, including for large-format retailers

• The presence of multiple churches and institutions seeking land for their growth

• The limited inventory of land to meet these growth needs.

Goossens suggested increasing the percentage of land allocated for institutional/commercial use would help provide motivation for the expansion of the town’s boundaries.

“We need a boundary expansion now,” he said. “We have two main landlords that own the majority of the excess residential land in town. That puts a lot of upward pressure on the cost of land in our town for more new subdivisions.”

He believes more supply will help the price go down. Although the town recently opened the second phase of the Van Norman Innovation Park, Goossens said that in the long term, there could be a shortage of industrial land as well.

Currently, the mix of available commercial/institutional land should be 15 percent of the total available residential land. Tillsonburg has much less than that.

“If a big box store comes to town, where would they go,” he said, saying there is limited commercial land.

The committee’s recommendation was to recommend to county council to increase the percentage to 30 per cent.

“Is 15 per cent enough to clean up our existing commercial land deficit,” Goossens asked. “Our opinion at economic development is we voted no we don’t think 15 per cent of new residential is enough to create new spaces for commercial that are big enough for some of these new developments, so we suggested 30.”

Raising this number would provide a “lever” to allow boundary expansion.

“We need to get these numbers a little higher so we can start to go to the county and start to push for more expansion of our town so we aren’t constrained by only a few property owners,” he said.

Economic Development Commissioner Cephas Panschow confirmed there are only two pieces of available commercial land in town, and there is a need for more in the future.

Council pondered accepting the recommendation, but in the end, a decision was made to accept it as information and defer that decision to the Oct. 14 meeting since the report it dealt with hadn’t been before council yet.