Town of Sutton
Sutton encourages citizen participation and supports affordable housing projects with two major announcements
The Town of Sutton has been keeping busy with the launch of its participatory budget and its affordable housing project proposal on the former Vieux-Verger property. Photo take from Town of Sutton website.
By Taylor McClure
Townships’ Daily News Bits
CIDI 99.1 FM
The Town of Sutton has a busy agenda with two major announcements to address the needs of its citizens.
Earlier this week the municipality launched a participatory budget of $50,000, a first for Sutton. The participatory budget was drafted by the Quality of Life Consultative Committee - made up of volunteers and two elected officials - and it provides Sutton residents of all ages with the opportunity to make decisions about the municipal budget by proposing projects that they would like to see happen in their community.
Mayor for the Town of Sutton, Mr. Robert Benoît, described the initiative as “a good way to get people to participate in municipal affairs” and he encourages citizens to be “autonomous” when developing their ideas.
“We want people to participate in the definition of their needs and improve quality of life. The idea is that this $50,000 will be decided by people, not by the town elected officials,” said Benoît. “(…) In the end there will be on the vote different projects. It could be one project of $50,000 or three projects of about $15,000 each.”
Over the last couple of weeks, the municipality also held two public information sessions to presents its proposed acquisition of the former Vieux-Verger property to citizens. The municipality’s intention is to develop an affordable housing project after coming to an agreement with the owners to buy the land at $1.4 million. According to Benoît, Sutton is facing a major shortage of affordable housing.
A registry will be held on April 29 for those that oppose the project to voice their concerns. If 492 signatures are collected, the municipality will decide whether it wants to go to a referendum or if it wants to shelve the project.
“We had an architecture firm take a new look because this is a project that has been planned for the last 12 years but for different reasons it was never accepted. (…) The Vieux-Verger is located five-minutes from downtown and it’s a pristine area, it’s a beautiful area” explained Benoît. “We want to conserve most of the site. The proposal is to conserve almost 75% of the site in perpetuity, for eternity. We want to use only 23% of the land to build roads and the housing. The other 20-30% will be a park for not only the residents, but all citizens of Sutton.”
Benoît noted that in order to build affordable housing the municipality will control the price of the land and it will remain the owner of the land until it sets criteria to negotiate with private companies interested in bidding on the project.
“This is the issue that was discussed at the second meeting. Are people of Sutton willing to buy the land at $1.4 million? We gave a contract to an evaluator to give us the just-market value of that land. They came up with the idea that if they compare the price of the land to other land in the area, the value is $1.4 million and probably more than that,” he explained. “The owners did their own survey and found out it’s much more than that, but we negotiated and in the end they accepted because they already wanted to build affordable houses.”
Highlighting the challenges in convincing the “free market” and private companies to build affordable housing, Benoît said everyone, from citizens to the government, need to pull together to address the affordable housing “crisis.”
“What the federal government is doing is that they’re helping private companies subsidize the interest rates and to have lower interest rates for them (…) so they can offer lower rents in apartments. This project (Vieux-Verger) could be about 80 houses or apartments,” he mentioned.
Following the two public information sessions, Benoît explained that there are some concerns over the lack of guarantee that the municipality will be able to negotiate for an affordable housing project and the use of public money by the municipality to buy land, but he views it as the last opportunity to have affordable housing in Sutton.
“It’s really the economic development of the village that will suffer if we don’t bring about affordable houses. Personally, I don’t think we have a choice. We have to tackle this problem because if we don’t we’ll be like other towns that are losing their Main Street, losing their people. We don’t want that to happen. We think we have a great village, a great town, we need to develop apartments,” he empathized.
More information about the participatory budget, its guidelines, and timeline, visit Dream Sutton.
More information about the proposed Vieux-Verger affordable housing project and tomorrow’s registry click here.
Listen to the full interview below: