On Wednesday, Jan. 17, the Town released a statement concerning the Marotta Rand Estate subdivision application and the now-withdrawn concept of using a portion of the Town-owned Heritage Trail for access. That statement can be found on the Town of NOTL website.
By way of background, on December 15, Council after emerging from a special in-camera meeting passed a resolution with a number of important recitals. We previously reported on that resolution on the SORE site.
Given public pushback on the idea of granting Mr. Marotta’s company a permanent easement over a portion of the Trail, Council wisely decided at a special meeting on Jan. 12 to backtrack and withdraw the offer. That idea is now dead. Without the Town’s cooperation as owner, Mr. Marotta is not in a position to pursue the Heritage Trail access.
Otherwise, the Town has reaffirmed the position articulated in its December 15 resolution:
a maximum of 135 residential units should be permitted in the proposed subdivision
the recommendations in the Denise Horne April, 2023 heritage report should be fully respected
access using the 200 John Street panhandle will be opposed by the Town, and
the “historic” access proposed by SORE (between 144 and 176 John) is viable and the preferred access.
The Town and SORE are now fully aligned going into the Ontario Land Tribunal hearing scheduled for this spring.
Mr. Marotta’s company is going to be filing an updated subdivision application on Monday. He could save both the Town and SORE a lot of money on hearing costs by simply filing an application complying with Council’s December 15 resolution. That would result in a one day hearing instead of the multi-week hearing currently scheduled. Sadly, we do not expect that will be the case.
We will provide a further update on Monday.
