You will never really see the first Guelph city council meeting of the year… Before Committee of the Whole, there’s going to be a special meeting of council where the horseshoe will meet entirely in-camera on one single topic. Why this special post about a meeting no one will see? Well, there’s some fairly important background on the topic you should keep in mind, and there might be some news about its future needing some context.
NOTE #1: There will be no delegate for this meeting.
NOTE #2: In addition to meeting in-person, this meeting will also be live-streamed on the City of Guelph’s website here.
NOTE #3: This meeting will take place at the special time of 12 pm!
CLOSED MEETING:
384 Crawley Road, Ontario Land Tribunal Update – If the address sounds familiar, it’s because it was one of the properties in question in the drama around the approval of Guelph’s last version of the Official Plan, and the Government of Ontario’s rewriting and undoing of certain changes.
At a December 2023 council meeting, reps from NewCold, who want to build a new facility on the property, asked council to not change the zoning back to the original version of the OP before the provincial government’s interference. They explained that they had already been working with staff on site plans and other applications for the project, and changing the zoning back to its original designation could mean losing the project completely, meaning hundreds of new jobs and the millions of dollars in new investment. Council retained the change by a marginal vote of 7-6.
NewCold’s plan is to build a 46-meter frozen high-bay warehouse covering 14,683 square meters plus two-story dispatch warehouse, but even before the snafu with the Official Plan their application was already before the Ontario Land Tribunal. According to the City of Guelph, the planning materials presented were incomplete including some missing drawings and other materials, but an April decision from the OLT determined that the application was complete and it can now make its way to city council for debate. If you’ve been following council business since then you will know that the proposal for the warehouse has not come to a planning meeting yet.
This special meeting, which is exclusively dedicated to a discussion about the OLT case around 384 Crawley Road, will be entirely dedicated to one in-camera discussion under Section 239(2)(e) and (f) of the Municipal Act for matters “regarding litigation or potential litigation, including matters before administrative tribunals, affecting the municipality or local board; and advice that is subject to solicitor-client privilege, including communications necessary for that purpose.”
Guelph Politico 