THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...

by Shawn Lackie

You know the saying, yes? “The more they stay the same.” 

In 1988, I decided I needed a change from the Toronto rat race, especially in the television field. I was running Communications for CBC Sports and really wasn’t looking forward to spending 6 weeks in Korea, for the Olympic Games. So I packed it in and came back to Port, to hook up with my Father-In-Law in his business.

That was around the time the economy was doing a bit of a dive (tank?), so it was fraught with uncertainty. However, because I was young and had ALL the answers (some things never change) I pushed headlong into it. Around that time, the land which was home to Conway Gardens, Bayshore and the local Car Wash, sold to an international consortium which wanted to build a super condo, where the Vos Independent now lives. There was a lot of talk about that. Some nice big penthouse suites. Prices were bandied about, but word was, they were anywhere from 400K to almost a million.

At the time, that was impressive. It turns out it was a little TOO impressive. A handful of buyers put down the deposit, but then things went south in the economy. Banks were cutting back lines of credit, to 10 percent of what they were previously. So the whole project flat-lined and people demanded their money back. The project died.

Around that time, a developer offered my father-in-law a rather large sum for his property, on Water Street, and he wanted to build condos. That idea died on the vine because he wasn’t ready to hang it up yet. That was too bad, he would have made a nice nest egg for himself.

Again, the result was economic problems. Sound familiar? How about Kings Landing, at Oyler and Simcoe Street? In 2018, I had Kevin Heritage, the Scugog Director of Development Services, as a guest on my TV show. He brought along some very impressive data, about what the Township had planned. Wow. 1,200 new living units over 4 years but then they adjusted that span to over 10 years. Either way, it was fairly aggressive and included a most impressive layout for Kings Landing. It really looked cool. A funny thing happened between the planning stage and the actual implementation. As in NOT!

Which brings us to the last few years in the Scugog area. The majority of people living in the area have expressed concern over growing the area too rapidly. More planning is needed to address both short-term and long-term concerns. Some very big-brained local people (no names mentioned) have said, we need more industrial and business growth. Mostly to offset the huge onus placed on residential taxpayers.

We moved back here in 2007 and have seen our tax bill increase almost 75 percent, over those 20 years. No matter how you cut it, that’s not good.

Time to roll up the sleeves and start finding other revenue streams (a much overused term). The locals are getting tired of the same old, same old, and you know THAT term for doing the same thing time and again.

Feel free to check out this story and more on my blog site, at https://slackie14.wixsite.com/buy-sell-and-more.