Quinte West City Council is looking into a plan to address the housing shortage from an unlikely source.
Council heard from Quinte West resident Scott Hamilton on a plan to bring more housing to the Quinte West area.
Hamilton was at the centre of an incident where during public input at the June 28 meeting of council, he spoke against pride flags and made derogatory comments against the transgender community.
At council’s following meeting on July 12, Mayor Jim Harrison apologized for allowing the remarks and for not maintaining an inclusive and safe environment.
Hamilton kept discussion of his speech solely on addressing the needs for more housing in Quinte West.
During delegations, Hamilton proposed council have 80 homes on five acres of city-owned land.
He said the houses are made by the Canadian government and are self-sufficient with power, heat and electricity.
The homes are run on a solar battery with solar panels attached to the top of the house.
During discussion on the motion, Councillor Don Kuntze expressed his doubts about the project saying that the cost to execute this plan would be exorbitant.
“His suggestion of purchasing land or acquiring some land somehow. Well, the price of land is not cheap. So there’s a few million dollars right there,” Kuntze explained to council.
“Then to put in roadways as he suggested, well, there’s several hundreds of thousands of dollars there to put in a roadway. Not to mention water and wastewater infrastructure. Now we’re talking millions of dollars.”
Kuntze says based on his view, the city does not have the resources to accommodate the plan and that council shouldn’t do anything on the proposed idea.
On the flip end, many councillors said that the proposal should be looked into to at least have due diligence done.
“I don’t want to create unnecessary work for staff but I think that a report even just kind of broadly skimming over the numbers and representing what sort of tax increase because we don’t want people to show up to further meetings and say ‘Well, Mr. Hamilton gave you (a solution) what did you do with that?’ There’s plenty of solutions that have been proposed. We do have to do our due diligence,” Councillor Zack Card said to council.
Councillor Egerton Boyce agreed with Card, saying the city should look at what staff brings back.
“I questioned some of the numbers to myself, but I’m waiting for some other numbers from our staff to come back. So I didn’t ask questions. But I think for due diligence, we did say there would be a report coming back. Let’s have a brief report coming back on the delegation,” Boyce said.
A report on the solution will be brought to a future council meeting.
