Tannery Property Has a Buyer

Ballpark to Remain Open Space

“Not to appear ungrateful for today’s respectful and overdue amendment, but it wasn’t the politicians who got our park back… it was the people,” Dennis Forbes

Article by John Campbell

Hastings - Trent Hills has a buyer for the former tannery property in Hastings.

Screen shot of council meeting, from left, Lynn Phillips, CAO; Mayor Bob Crate; Doug Irwin Director of Legislative Services/Clerk

Council went into closed session last week to discuss its potential sale before emerging to pass a motion directing staff “to proceed as directed with respect to the agreement of purchase and sale dated July 14.”

Director of Planning and Development Jim Peters said in an interview the municipality is “still trying to finalize the agreement.”
“It’s a good offer, we’re very close but (there are) still some details to work out,” he said. “I think this matter can be resolved quickly,” he added.

Peters declined to identify the prospective buyer, who first approached council about acquiring the property earlier this year. Discussions began in “late spring, early summer,” Peters said.

The six-acre property at the end of Front Street East is currently zoned industrial but that will need to be amended, depending “on how the sale goes and what the applicants want to do.”
“Obviously, there is some environmental cleanup that has to be looked at but it’s right at the edge of the downtown so we foresee that it could be a mix of uses.”

Tannery

Peters said testing was done on the site many years ago after the municipality took possession of it. Should it be sold, the buyer “will have to do further work to determine what needs to be done.”

“The study we had done indicated there’d be some cleanup necessary but it’s not terrible, let’s put it that way,” he said. “There is potential for redevelopment of the site for sure.”
Peters said “it has always been council’s position that anybody who buys this land would be getting it as it is.”

The Trent Hills community was consulted as to what it would like to see done with the property. Residents in Hastings supported having it cleaned up and redeveloped “if possible,” Peters said, and that information “has been shared” with people interested in acquiring the property.
One resident who welcomed the land being cleaned up and re-purposed said it has “remained derelict and in disrepair for far too long.”

Council formally declared the tannery land surplus at its Aug. 9 meeting.

Ballpark Lands

Also at that meeting, it voted to have the former ballpark at the corner of Front Street West and Bridge Street returned to open space, putting to an end the possibility of it being used for residential development.
“It will be a park and perhaps there will be future plans for what to do with those lands and make more them available and more responsive to the needs of the community,” Peters said.

Ballpark in Hastings. Image by Dennis Forbes

The change in direction – more than one proposal to build housing units on the site met resistance locally and fell by the wayside – came about “in response to the community consultation,” he said.

Among those happy to see the turn of events was Dennis Forbes, who spearheaded the fight to keep the ballpark open space and forced the municipality to defend its decision to rezone the land high density residential. The Local Planning Appeal Tribunal ruled in the municipality’s favour but the developer chose not to proceed with his offer.

In a posting on his Facebook page this week, Forbes wrote the public’s input on the future of the park was “overwhelmingly in favour of retaining the parkland” following “an exhaustive grassroots campaign.”

Forbes said there had been “many twists and turns over the past 16 years, to right a grievous wrong, but throughout all of this the constant has been a village that refused to sit idle and watch while their park was decimated in the name of progress and increased tax base.”

“Past, present and future generations all owe a debt of thanks to the ongoing, combined efforts of the Hastings Revitalization Association and the countless unnamed individuals who over the years relentlessly pushed back.”

“Not to appear ungrateful for today’s respectful and overdue amendment, but it wasn’t the politicians who got our park back… it was the people,” he wrote.