Innisfil’s Heritage Committee told councillors a story of potential heartbreak on Valentine’s Day.
The committee’s Lesley Sterling and Deb Crawford outlined the hurdles facing the committee in the next 12 months, as it stares down changes implemented by the Province of Ontario regarding the listing and designation of heritage properties in Bill 23.
Schedule 6 of the bill enacted amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act (OHA), including a new provision as to how long a property can be listed on a town’s heritage register without designating it under the OHA. Any property listed before Dec. 31, 2022 must be designated by Jan. 1, 2025, or it will be removed from the register. Properties listed after Jan. 1, 2023, must be designated within two years of being listed or they will suffer the same fate.
For Innisfil, that puts 57 properties in jeopardy and at risk of being destroyed, regardless of their historical importance.
“We are running out of time,” Sterling said. “The clock is ticking on those properties that were on the list already as of Jan. 2023; we’ve only got 10-and-a-half months to get through the rest of them.”
Once a property is removed from the register, it can not be re-added for five years.
The issue could be eliminated if council were able to issue about five or six intentions to designate each month for the remainder of 2024. But that isn’t feasible, mostly because of how the Heritage Advisory Committee is made up and what they’re required to do.
The committee is a volunteer organization, with Deputy Mayor Kenneth Fowler acting as chair. It’s those volunteers who are tasked with researching a property, reaching out to the current homeowners and then reporting to council on their findings.
Instead, the group is focused on protecting what they feel are the most at-risk historical properties in the municipality. That list has 14 properties on it.
Fowler provided his colleagues with some insight as to how that list was narrowed down. A heritage farmhouse at the 6th Line and County Road 5 might not pose the same threat as a home on the 6th Line in the middle of the proposed Orbit development.
“If there’s a home outside the settlement boundaries in the growth areas of Innisfil that falls under a designation, we’re not looking at it and saying, ‘okay, we have to do this now,’” the deputy mayor said. “If something is outside the boundaries and it’s taken off the list for five years because we weren’t able to get to it, we know that we have the time to come and approach the owners of the property, whereas something right in the centre of Alcona, that’s a little more now.”
Sterling and Crawford also took the time to try and do a bit of myth-busting about heritage designation.
“Everyone gets all worried and they think … you’re stuck there, (that) you can’t do anything with it: you can’t reuse it, you can’t add anything to it, you can’t build onto it, you can’t paint,” Crawford said. “It’s not true at all. You can do all of those things.”
“A lot of people assume the exterior and the interior can’t be touched,” Fowler added. “There are only certain elements that are seen more often than not from the outside and some occasions where it’s on the inside, but there is a lot of allowance for the homeowner if they wish to move forward and update the home to a degree.”
It’s not always “black and white,” he continued, with Sterling adding that sometimes renovations are mandated in order to bring the home up to current building codes.
A heritage easement agreement is signed between the property owner and the town as part of the designation process and work can occur on the site as outlined in that document. These properties are eligible for a rebate of 30 per cent on municipal property taxes and some studies have shown that property values for these homes perform equal to or better compared to other properties in a municipality.
This would make the homes easier to sell than many would assume, but this part of the presentation didn’t land with a few councillors.
Coun. Rob Saunders wanted to know the process if a homeowner refused to accept the heritage committee’s recommendation to designate. When reminded the OHA doesn’t require homeowner consent and told that if the committee felt the property strongly represents the history of Innisfil it would be recommended anyway, he was not impressed.
“If you’re coming after my property and telling me what to do with my million-dollar house, it wouldn’t sit well with me,” Saunders said.
The decision to designate a property rests with council and as recently as November it voted against the recommendation of the committee to designate a property in Lefroy. However, any decision to designate can be appealed, councillors were told.
They were also told of the importance of considering all designation and listing requests by Mayor Lynn Dollin, who shared two previous examples in Cookstown where links to the village’s past were erased without any input from council.
An old one-prisoner jail cell was adjacent to the train tracks on Dufferin Street and was purchased by a developer with the intent to tear it down. A few years later, the same thing happened with the blacksmith shop.
“The whole town revolted against this happening,” the mayor said. “They wanted to keep that piece of history in the village but there was no recourse for that to happen; there was no ability for us to make that developer keep that piece of history.”
She lauded her colleagues’ commitment to their constituents while asking to keep and eye on the greater good.
“I totally understand where you’re coming from as far as property rights are concerned, but there are times when that heritage too works on behalf of the Town of Innisfil,” Dollin said.
The presentation also acknowledged the winners of the 2023 Heritage Property Awards, honouring Bruce and Terry Chambers of Cookstown and Sylvain Desjeans and Suzanne Villeneuve of Stroud. The awards will be presented to the winners at a future date.
