Raise the Hammer

"Well, I can tell ya... The downtown used to be flourishing, in the 60s and 70s, and then urban sprawl really took hold in Hamilton. And we've put hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars in subsidies to developers in the form of extremely low, or almost no development charges to allow all the urban sprawl to occur in all the suburban parts of the city, south of Hamilton, for example, and that's a very, very clear subsidy that Councils -largely in the past- have provided to those developers so they could grow ever further southwards, which has supported Limeridge Mall and other developments up there at the expense of the downtown. At the same time, the downtown got worse and worse for many years, until the last ten years or so, when the City began its CIP programme for the downtown. You know, I could go on about Glanbrook Business Park, with the subsidy of the Maple Leaf Foods development coming in. Hundreds of thousands of subsidies went to landing Maple Leaf Foods, that was done, we had this explained to us by Tim and others, that's done for the public good, and of course, it has to be, it can't be an entirely private subsidy, it's done for the public good to attract jobs, in that case that was the main focus for us as a city. This is the same thing. We're supporting the downtown in other ways to, in this case to attract a grocery store and what we would hope would be additional housing that would come, that would more than pay for the grocery store coming in through this grant programme. So I think it's a bit rich to pick on the downtown subsidies. If we added up the numbers, they'd be in the millions for subsidizing urban sprawl. over the past probably four or five decades here in Hamilton. We've been in the urban sprawl business for a long time, and we need to turn our attention to the downtown."



Ward 1 Councillor Brian McHattie
GIC meeting, June 20, 2012
re: the $650,000 'forgivable loan/grant' proposal for a downtown grocery store