Corp Comm Connects

Hamilton brownfields getting shovel ready

NRU
Dec. 21, 2016
Andrew Cohrs

Looking to leverage new opportunities for the Stelco lands and other brownfield areas in the city, Hamilton is taking action to attract new employers, keep existing ones and remain Canada’s most diversified economy.

Last Wednesday council adopted the Economic Development Action Plan 2016-2020. It lays out an ambitious strategy to make Hamilton one of the most attractive places to set up shop in southern Ontario. The strategy involves maximizing opportunities on existing industrial properties, increasing the supply of serviced industrial and commercial land, developing a diverse workforce, promoting the innovation and technology sectors, attracting new major economic assets, such as a fi lm studio, and supporting increased transit service to employment lands.

In his new role as Hamilton’s economic development director Glen Norton is energized about the redevelopment potential of the Stelco lands. A pending sale of the steel manufacturing giant could result in about 200 ha of available industrial land.

“It’s probably the single biggest opportunity we will have in the next 10 years,” Norton told NRU. “We are very keen to have our hand in there to help guide that redevelop and to attract new businesses to those lands...We have rail, we have highway and we have water right [at] the site... It is all level [and] not all that difficult to service.”

If approved by the courts, prospective buyer Bedrock Industries would place the entire site—about 324 ha—into a land trust with the steel pensioners and workers as the benefactors and commit $80-million dollars to environmental clean-up. The Ontario government has indicated that it will cover any additional clean-up costs. Since modern processes of steel manufacturing require less space, the ending sale could result in more than half of the site being made available for redevelopment.

“We definitely want to maintain it as employment lands. In preference, it wouldn’t necessarily be smokestack industries but the areas that Hamilton excels in like advanced manufacturing... steel servicing... [and] agri-business,” Norton said.

A goal of the action plan is to triple the tax assessment of the Stelco lands from $5-million to $15-million. Accordingly, Norton also floated ideas of welcoming a fi lm studio or a bigdata centre to the site, saying that the city wants to attract higher density industries to ensure the value of land is being maximized.

“We are all in this together. When we attract new living wage jobs and new non-residential tax assessment, everybody in the city benefits.”

As with other areas in Hamilton, to facilitate redevelopment and achieve higher employment densities, the city may choose to purchase a portion of the Stelco lands, make it ready for development and sell it. Norton says that this practice of land banking plays a critical part in the city achieving the action plan’s goal of having 200 ha of shovel-ready industrial and commercial land. The city currently has a 10-ha parcel of land in its land bank.

“The idea is to make sure that we have land ready to go quickly...We would buy some land that the private sector hasn’t bothered with, if it needed a rezoning, we would do the rezoning, and we would service it... So to supplement what land] the private sector has, we would like to have other land [available],” Norton said.

While the city expects the private sector to contribute the lion’s share of development-ready land, council authorized a $30-million loan to purchase property last Wednesday. Norton says that by investing in property and preparing it for development, the city can demonstrate to the private sector what is possible.

“Maybe we buy some land for the land trust and we service it and get it ready—so maybe we are the first ones in—to show what can be done... Maybe there is some contaminated property in the downtown core that isn’t moving. Maybe the zoning is wrong, maybe there is contamination, so maybe, to make it happen, we need to buy it.”

A court decision on the Stelco lands is expected mid-2017.