(Image from Northern Bruce Peninsula website.)
Northern Bruce Peninsula is approving its 2023 Community Improvement Plan.
Council heard from Bruce County Planning and Development Regional Economic Development Coordinator Christina Tennyson and Economic Development Manager Jeffrey Loney during a meeting on June 26 about the new plan.
Loney says the plan’s purpose is to allow municipalities to participate in downtown revitalization and financial incentive activities.
“This is the only way under the Municipal Act that you are able to provide what would normally be considered bonusing to private entities,” says Loney.
He says one of the largest changes to the plan includes a tiered mapping process, where the municipality has been identified as a priority area.
“What the priority areas allow us to do, is to ensure that dollars, and time and effort and impact is targeted into those priority areas, while still ensuring that different types of programs that provide different types of impacts are available to those across the entire municipality,” says Loney.
Additionally, the plan includes proposed grant categories. One is development incentives, which aims at large scale developments in the area. Another grant category is building and property improvement incentives, which targets commercial accommodation refurbishments.
He says community improvement plans were built and always intended to be a downtown revitalization tool, but have been expanded in recent years.
He says as the county is unable to have community improvement plans, they have been working with Northern Bruce Peninsula since the inception of the Spruce the Bruce program, which helps communities by offering resources to maintain and grow commercial areas.
“That is our way to enable that type of program in individual municipalities,” says Loney.
Following the passing of a by-law to officially approve this at a later date, there will be a 20-day appeal period before this plan is in effect.