The final Bradford West Gwillimbury town council meeting for 2021 gave councillors the chance to wrap up a couple of projects while looking ahead to some items in the new year.
With one year on the books, the town is making a few tweaks to its Heritage Property Tax Rebate Program.
Council passed a housekeeping amendment at its Dec. 21 meeting. The program was first approved in December 2019 before being enacted by a bylaw in September 2020.
The biggest change brought about by the amendment is to give residents more time to apply for the rebate.
“We have learned that the holiday period is extremely busy for residents, and it takes time for residents to complete the application and accumulate information for the past year,” wrote Brandon Slopack, senior planner for the town, in a staff report.
The current deadline to submit a rebate application is Dec. 31. Under the new proposal, that deadline would be pushed back two months, aligning with the provincial deadline.
“Staff suggest that it could be beneficial to all parties to extend the submission deadline to Feb. 28 of the year following which the rebate is desired,” Slopack added.
The housekeeping amendment also included a clause that will make requests such as the one outlined above a thing of the past. A section was added to the existing bylaw that would allow staff to make minor adjustments to the guidelines for the purpose of administering the program.
“The purpose of this provision would be to allow staff to make minor administrative program adjustments to improve and adapt the program based on experiences and feedback from residents and staff,” Slopack wrote. “If this change were implemented, staff would be able to make minor adjustments for administration purposes, such as implementing the first revision stated above, without seeking further amendment to the bylaw.”
Not only did councillors agree to changes that would make its Heritage Property Tax Rebate Program easier for residents, but they also moved forward on a request that could make it easier to preserve the trees currently found in the town.
At the recent Healthy Communities Advisory Committee meeting, staff gave an overview of the next steps in implementing a tree preservation program. The committee recommended a special meeting of council be held to sort out the details of what this program could look like.
“We’ve been talking at a few meetings now about a tree preservation bylaw,” said Coun. Peter Ferragine, who chairs the committee. “That way, we can try to keep our tree canopy in our municipality. We’re growing so fast; a lot of our trees are coming down.”
Similar bylaws, he added, are found in other municipalities. The special meeting of council would be designed as a workshop where councillors would review what is being done in those municipalities. This way, Ferragine suggested, the locally-drafted solution should be able to make everyone around the council table happy.
Council made some local groups happy by formalizing its grants for 2022 to conclude the meeting.
Eleven groups will benefit from the $22,000 to be given out by the municipality each year, ranging from $500 for the Danube Seniors Centre to $5,000 for the Bradford Board of Trade.
Beyond the budgeted amount from the Community Support Program, the town was able to provide some further grants through the Council Community Initiatives Fund. That fund, populated from money raised at the 2019 council golf tournament, supported five organizations to the tune of $6,000.