The Town’s Municipal Heritage Committee (MHC) met yesterday evening to consider the staff heritage report on the new Marotta Rand application. Our summary of the staff report can be found on our website.
In short, the Committee unanimously endorsed the staff report sending Benny Marotta back to the drawing board. The Committee also voted unanimously to require Solmar in whatever revised application it comes back with to specifically address the findings and orders of the Ontario Land Tribunal in its October 2024 decision, specifically:
- The Dunington-Grubb pool garden to remain in place and be rehabilitated
- The Bath Pavilion to remain in situ and connected to the pool garden complex
- The Carriage House to be retained
- The various Dunington-Grubb designed landscape features to be conserved and rehabilitated
- That the mature trees on Randwood form part of the protected cultural heritage landscape
- That a tree preservation plan is to “inform” the development concept.
The MHC also voted unanimously that any new/revised application resulting from the staff report and the MHC recommendations above must be brought back to MHC for review and consideration.
Some of the comments from members of the MHC last night are worth noting. One member called the new application “very frustrating” and said that she was “gobsmacked by the lack of thought” it evidences about the cultural heritage landscape at Rand. She asked the Solmar representatives why the OLT Decision was not the first benchmark when determining what the development concept would be – a question that they could not or would not answer.
Another MHC member said that he was “quite distressed” and “very disheartened” by the new Marotta application. He stated that in his view it was obvious that Solmar had simply “taken a preferred concept and plunked it down on the site” and then asked themselves “OK, what can we explain away”?
Professor Brendan Stewart, a heritage landscape expert at the University of Guelph, spoke to the Committee last night in support of the staff report. He noted that the report, properly understood, calls for nothing less than a fundamental redesign of the development concept, using a constraints-based, heritage first approach, in line with the December 15, 2023 Council resolution and the 2024 OLT Decision. Focusing specifically on the proposed 200 John panhandle subdivision street, Mr. Stewart called it simply “untenable” from a heritage perspective.
SORE wishes to correct one thing the Committee heard last night from Solmar’s Blake Lyon. He stated that he had “met” with SORE on Solmar’s new development proposal. The inference was that SORE had been consulted. That is not correct. SORE did meet with Mr. Lyon shortly before the application was publicly announced. At his request, the meeting was confidential and SORE was asked not to release any details about the proposal. More to the point, however, at no time during that meeting was SORE asked for any input on the proposal, contrary to the impression Mr. Lyon appeared to be trying to leave with the Committee. But if Mr. Lyon now wants our input, we suggest he start with Professor Stewart’s presentation to MHC last night.
The Town heritage staff report and the additional recommendations from MHC last night will now feed into the Town’s further planning review. It all seems to us to be an enormous waste of time and resources, as the Town heritage report leaves no doubt that nothing short of a complete rethink of the application is in order. It would be nice if Mr. Marotta and Mr. Lyon would accept that reality rather than continuing to try to advance an application that flies in the face of everything that has happened since the Denise Horne report.