The City of Brantford has chosen affordable housing over golf as councillors voted in favour of selling the city-owned Arrowdale Municipal Golf Course.
During Tuesday’s late-night session, 11 councillors voted eight to three to “dispose” of the 92-year-old course and allocate the proceeds to build affordable housing within municipal boundaries.
A week earlier, a consultant’s study identified the course as a property the city could sell for close to $20 million to a developer with the prospect of generating $3 million in property tax revenue.
The motion to sell the course came from Coun. Jan Vanderstelt, who said during the report’s presentation that the nine-hole course had been running in the red for several years due to declining membership, which was down to just 146 in 2018.
Sixteen delegations, with the bulk of them opposed to the sale, spoke at Tuesday’s city council meeting. A group lead by the Friends of Arrowdale Facebook campaign touted the space as a “great beginner course” with “a wonderful greenspace.” The group came to council with close to 3,000 petition signatures.
In her plea to keep the course, Elisabeth Chernichenko, who grew up in Brantford, asked councillors, “What changed?” after a 2016 promise by the city to invest in the upkeep of the course.
“Instead of promises and looking over at your singular metric and financials and making an insular decision, we want you to do your homework. We want intentional city planning.”
Chernichenko also likened Brantford’s affordable housing issues to those documented in 2013 by Hamilton’s city council, which opted to spend millions on rehabilitating existing housing stock instead of developing more green space.
Coun. Richard Carpenter, also against the sale, berated council, saying the sale would be “one of the worst decisions councils have made in this city for decades.”
“Think about it: we’re just seeing an opportunity to cash in and use the people that need affordable housing as scapegoats,” said Carpenter.
Coun. Josh Wall said residents in the city didn’t seem to care one way or another.
“I took to my skill set to social media and the public. When I walked around Ward 5, I talked to people on the street, I went into the Tim Hortons, I went to the restaurants and I talked to everybody,” said Wall. “The resounding message has been, ‘I don’t care.'”
Wall went on to say that giving him a choice of voting for a subsidized golf course or affordable housing, he would support housing.
Approximately 49 acres of Arrowdale will now be sold to developers for cash which would then, in turn, be spent on affordable housing projects.
Fifteen acres of the course will be transformed by the city into a park and open green space.
Council also agreed to keep the course open for the 2020 golf season.
Comments