Saugeen Shores Mayor Luke Charbonneau says 2024 was a year of looking further down the road for the Town, and planning for the longer-term.
It was also a year to celebrate how far the community has come.
“It was our 25th anniversary this year,” says Charbonneau, adding, “That was a big highlight for the year. We put together our time capsule, put together some new heritage driving tours, we had the Lieutenant Governor come and visit us and had a big celebration with her. We had a whole year worth of stuff and a really good celebratory weekend in August.
Looking back on 2024, Charbonneau says, “Another highlight would be the aquatics and wellness centre which started construction this year and looks good to be open by the fall of 2025. So that’s a pretty major project for us and it’s going to end up being a regional hub for recreation and wellness for our community and for our surrounding communities.”
The $49 million dollar rec centre will be attached to the Plex and also includes town hall. It will have a pool, a gym and fitness studios.
Charbonneau says, “We’ve been doing a lot of planning for the future this year. We’ve just released our first ten-year operating and capital plan. So we’ve managed to put together a solid ten-year budget that lays out the things we’re going to do for the next decade and shows how we’re going to pay for those things. We’ve been working on plans to expand Southampton’s sewage treatment plant, working on plans to expand our landfill and do all the things we need to do to —–keep up with growth in our community and make sure that we have all the services we need to continue to provide good services as our community grows.”
He says Saugeen Shores faces the same challenges as other communities, noting, “Housing is a significant challenge in our community, as it is in communities everywhere. The great thing about our community is we have the opportunity to address those challenges in unique ways because of our growth. As we grow, we attract builders and developers and folks who can help us to address that affordable housing issue. We’ve had a lot of success actually in 2024 with adjusting our zoning bylaw rules to incentivise a better mix of housing, more additional dwelling units and we’ve been trying to reduce the regulatory burden that has stood in the way of the development of more affordable housing.
Charbonneau adds, Bruce Power recently announced $38,000 in funding to help develop an additional residential unit toolkit project to make it easier for folks to develop additional dwelling units. He explains, that toolkit will have free, ready to use design templates for things like granny suites and additional residential buildings that people can access if they want to create more housing options on their land.
“Basically, folks will be able to pick that up off the shelf and take it over to the building department and get a building permit,” says Charbonneau, who notes, “Often one of the impediments to building it is trying to figure out how to include it and how to make that work as part of the construction project. There’s a cost to that– architects and the like— and we’re trying to take that cost away, give people a clearer path to get additional dwelling units constructed.”
He says also in 2024 they increased the Town’s contribution to the municipal housing allowance to $225,000 for 2025 which provides monthly rent assistance to as many as 40 minimum wage earning households.
“Our greatest advantage is also our greatest challenge and that’s growth,” says Charbonneau, adding, we have to make sure that as we grow we do it in a way that protects the character of our community and that we can keep up with, in terms of our infrastructure and servicing.”
The Town also plans to try and get its unique community permit planning system up and running, an idea it’s aiming to pilot in the area that would streamline the planning application process and reduce the time it takes by as much as half. “It’s very expensive because it’s a brand new way of planning that hasn’t been done anywhere, really so it’s very expensive to do, it requires some expertise we don’t have to implement. It is in our 2025 budget and I feel pretty good that it’s something we’re actually going to be able to get off the ground in 2025, financially.”
Looking ahead, Charbonneau says, “We have a great 2025 capital plan. Lots of work in parks across the community, lots of work on core infrastructure, we’ve got funding this year to do work on the resurfacing of Highway 21 through Port Elgin which is a much needed project,” says Charbonneau who notes he’s thankful for that funding from the provincial government for that. Work is also planned on High Street in Southampton. He says he has a cannonball scheduled for the day the aquatics and wellness centre opens in 2025.
Charbonneau credits Town staff for moving projects ahead. “We sometimes talk about all the big ticket, or the flashy things that we’re doing,or planning to do, but really the thing that makes it work is the folks who come to work every day and do the payroll, pay the bills, cut the grass, run the Zamboni. That’s the meat and potatoes of what the municipality does. It’s 90 per cent of what we do and all those services that folks receive, things like cleaning up the beach or working at the landfill site or being a volunteer firefighter, we’ve got a lot of folks doing a lot of good things.”