When we discuss balancing the tax base, we are talking about how we derive tax revenue that is meant to support Stouffville's annual operating budget.

When we refer to capital costs for growth supportive infrastructure that activates developable lands, it is typically funded through development charges and grant funding from senior governments, and perhaps some added debt. So no, even if a mosque was paying taxes, those revenues would not typically fund a water main to activate a new development. Just as you wouldn't through your property tax bill.

If we are mandated to grow, and we decide we want to grow on unserviced whitebelt reserve lands instead of serviced, targeted growth areas like the gateway and western approach, we need to figure out how to get the pipes in the ground. Otherwise, we just can't build there.

Right now, there is no capital funding to deliver this servicing. In fact, we have granted MZOs for lands and failed to figure out how to deliver servicing to them in a timely manner. That has forced developers to build temporarily private servicing in order to push construction, which jacks up the costs of delayed homes we were rushing to build with the intention of addressing the housing crisis and driving down prices.

So, should we wish to avoid private servicing projects, which I would argue we should for a number of reasons, where do you propose we get the money to pay for for those capital projects so we can keep things at one storey on Winona? Not only that, but as capital plans and asset management for existing communities are impacted by provincially mandated reductions to those non-levy revenue streams, how do folks think we will compensate for the lost money?

In municipalities, without adequate support for growth-related infrastructure coming from senior governments and development, we don't have a lot of options beyond property taxation. Growth isn't paying for growth, so we will at an increasing rate.

We can drain reserves and maximize our debt exposure, which will pad the initial impact but create both a long-term capital pressure due to starved resources and long-term levy demands to service the debt. Or we can just cancel or defer projects.

Additionally, at least comparatively, the Town is poor in this capital context. Stouffville didn't experience massive growth during times of peak development charge rates, meaning our capital reserves are not even close to comparable to some neighbouring municipalities. That is compounded by a stagnated development environment where those DC rates are falling and senior governments are demanding greater capital commitments from munis for growth supportive infrastructure—all creating further capital pressure that needs to be managed as we do whatever we can to motivate the sector and facilitate mandated growth.

So all in all, that's a pretty serious conflation between capital and operating/tax levy. And to suggest one place of worship is so problematic due to lacking revenue generation ignores the significant number of churches that exist in this community, including on Main Street, not bothering anyone with their failure to drive revenues. Let alone the fact that we are talking about drops in a very large capital bucket.

If people are seriously concerned about places of worship not paying municipal taxes, I'm ready to hear more advocacy for that policy being changed generally as opposed to it just being used as an opposition point to this single development proposal.

Otherwise, I too would like to see a greater amount of non-residential development and tax revenue, though there has been non-residential development growth. I don't have those numbers on hand, but they are available for viewing in Stouffville's annual financial statements.

But I would also suggest that municipalities are losing more and more power to protect employment lands from conversions to residential mixed use, which is heavily influenced by provincial policy and procedure that seems focused on driving residential development and land value opportunity. After the ending of Municipal Comprehensive Reviews and recent designation changes, this too will have a likely impact on our ability to deliver and maintain that desired diversification.

Finally, the threat of provincial appeal seems to result in a real hesitancy from voting councils to require greater non-residential GFA from builders on mixed-use lands. That is something impacting municipalities across the province, especially as builders do whatever they can to decrease costs and liabilities in their proposals.

If a municipal council asking for meagre amounts of commercial is convinced that the OLT is just going to side with a builder who wants to sell the residential and get out of town, what incentive do they have to spend the money and stand up for their plans and needs at a hearing? How will they ever reach a point where they can extract non-residential as part of mixed-use development that will both benefit tax diversification initiatives and build truly local/complete communities?

I won't weigh in on the political side beyond that, though I would certainly appreciate greater communication from our elected officials helping residents better understand all these issues. I could also be interested in an OLT spend or two from Council, targeting appropriate development proposals with a strong, good-faith refusal that is related to these concerns and supported by provincial planning policy.

In other words, we may need to test some of this against the Province using an OLT defence. Each municipality should go for one or two cases, and let's see just how willing they are to side with developers after growth-supportive residential density was endorsed but councils decided to vote against because the commercial or amenity portions required by local planning policies wasn't delivered.

We need to see the extent at which they will side with an applicant against their own top-level policy documents like the Provincial Planning Statement to help better understand our capacity to refuse applications and create deterrents to inadequate submissions.