It may be frozen out there, but global climate change was top of mind at this January regular meeting of Guelph city council. The City believes that there’s room to do better on its own climate change goals and presented the Corporate Climate Action Plan to carve a path forward, and then council considered a rare petition that surfaced to their level for debate. Were some parkland fees changed unfairly or not? Find out what council thought in the recap!
Regular Meeting of Council – January 27, 2026
The last council meeting in January got started late by about 15 minutes but Mayor Cam Guthrie said that council gave direction to staff concerning encroachments in the Sloan Hill Park project and approved the CAO performance review. If you’re interested in hearing more about Tara Baker’s objectives for this year, tune into next week’s Committee of the Whole meeting…
Getting into the business of this meeting, general manager of facilities and energy management Ian Scott and energy climate change Bryan Ho-Yan laid out the Corporate Climate Action Plan, which aims to cut 10,000 tonnes of carbon emitted from City facilities and assets by 2034, which is all part of the plan to get the City to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Since establishing a baseline in 2018, the City has saved over $11 million in energy costs, but slashing all that extra carbon will mean an additional cost of $247 million in building upgrades, energy generation projects and converting fleets, including transit fleets, to EV.
There were two delegates for the plan, but the one that got the most attention was from eMERGE’s Evan Ferrari who’s starting a research project through the University of Guelph to explore a solar project at the Eastview landfill. Ferrari called it “climate lemonade”, using the old landfill property as a solar farm that could generate between 10 and 15 megawatts of power when fully realized, and all it would require from the City in terms of investment is access to data.
Council had many questions for Ferrari and then a few questions for Ho-Yan including some highly technical queries from Councillor Dan Gibson about the use of digestive gases, but for the most past there was a bullish reaction to the plan and it was approved unanimously. Next steps? Staff will bring those back in future budget documents, but Ho-Yan noted that this was a decade-long process and not something that will be done in just a few years.
The only other item on the agenda was a petition to wave parkland development fees at 53 Woodside Road. The owners of this property demolished the four-bedroom home built in the 60s and replaced it with a new four-bedroom home, but since the floor space increased by 50 per cent new parkland dedication fees came into play. The problem, according to petitioner Gary Scandlan, was that his daughter and son-in-law were not made aware of changes to the fee schedule that resulted in the amount of parkland fees nearly doubling between the first consultation and when they filed the finished paperwork.
In other words, if they had filed the demolition permit two weeks earlier, the parkland fees they ended up paying would have only cost half. Scandlan, who was once a managing partner with Watson & Associates, and whose expertise was in municipal finance, considered a trip to the Ontario Land Tribunal, but opted to find a less costly solution through Ward 5 Councillor Leanne Caron and brought this petition instead. As for what council could do, their options were limited: They could either uphold the payment of fees, or they could waive the fees entirely. There was no in-between.
A motion was put on the floor to waive the fees, but there was still a lot of questions among councillors about what exactly they were being asked to approve. Once they figured that out, there was concern about establishing precedent and when asked for an opinion, city solicitor Jennifer Charles said that they couldn’t answer hypotheticals and only consider these things on a case-by-case basis.
Mayor Guthrie asked for a five-minute break that became a 10-minute break, but after working the room, he believed that he found a solution and asked Scandlan if the proponent would be willing to voluntarily pay back the original amount of parkland fees before the schedule changed, and Scandlan said they would be happy to. So it was a done deal, right? Not so fast because Councillor Phil Allt asked for a privileged discussion in-camera.
It didn’t take long for council to return, but unanimity was still hard to achieve; some on council backed up staff saying that they followed procedure to the letter while others noted that there was a big change over a period of just 12 days and they could afford to be magnanimous. It was a close vote, but by a slim 6-5 margin council choice magnanimity. Guthrie, master of understatement, noted that this situation was “very unique”.
Click here to see the complete recap of the meeting.
Guelph Politico 