Mayor 'grateful' for how quickly Innisfil councillors meshed
'We have a cohesive group that is in it for the right reasons and so interested in Innisfil,' mayor says of colleagues, as she reflects on 2023
Innisfiltoday.ca
Jan. 2, 2024
Patrick Bales
Innisfil Mayor Lynn Dollin begins her day the same way each morning. While she’s having her coffee, she opens up Municipal World Daily, a municipal news-clipping service.
“It should be renamed to Councillors Behaving Badly,” she said during a recent interview with InnisfilToday. “All these horror stories from across the country where things have not gone well.”
It’s a learning tool for the mayor and other subscribers: consistent, real examples of what not to do when you’re running a municipality. But Dollin finds an immense positive in the articles she consumes each day.
“I take that moment every day to be grateful we have a cohesive group that is in it for the right reasons and so interested in Innisfil and making it the best place it can be,” she said.
Dollin -- who will be celebrating her 30th year of public service in 2024 -- is entering her sixth year as Innisfil mayor, her first with strong mayor powers, which were granted to the municipality and dozens of others in Ontario in 2023. She’s the veteran at the head of a table populated by a new generation of politicians.
In fact, her three decades of council experience exceeds the combined total of her eight council colleagues. Five of the seven ward councillors were first elected in 2022; the three councillors who were re-elected with Dollin that year, including the deputy mayor, are only now in their second term.
How quickly the group has come to work together cohesively is the highlight for Dollin in 2023.
“I don’t know if you know how unusual it is to have councillors all rowing in the same direction, especially with five brand new councillors,” she said. “The biggest success would be onboarding the new group.”
As the first year of this term ended, InnisfilToday asked the deputy mayor and the ward councillors in Innisfil what they thought the biggest success of 2023 was. Universally, the response was concocting the town’s updated Strategic Plan.
“The success of the Strategic Plan was having them understand how important it was,” she said. “Strategic planning is not just about how you envision your community, it’s about how you envision your community a decade in advance.”
Equally important was that every councillor felt that their voice was heard in the Strategic Plan, Dollin added. Given her experience -- and how repetitive ideas in municipal politics can be, even as everything else seems to change -- Dollin said she went into this process doing her best to be constructive, particularly with ideas she might have heard before. There’s no need to quash anyone’s dream but rather look for new ways to overcome the stumbling blocks that might have hindered a similar project the last time around.
Dollin admits that strategic planning is not a process she enjoys, yet realizes its value in any community, particularly one that is growing like Innisfil.
Growth has been the largest challenge facing Innisfil for many years, but as Dollin views every challenge as an opportunity, she finds optimism in the municipality’s ability to guide that growth in a way that benefits new and existing residents.
That means the town needs to accommodate its rural roots and the evolution of its urban centres. These can cause a lot of growing pains, the mayor admitted. It is often councillors who take the brunt of the criticism, from new residents who lament a lack of services compared to what they’re used to (such as a fixed-route transit system) or from the agricultural sector, concerned about the speed and impatience found in some of the drivers otherwise unfamiliar with country roads during harvest.
“We are in a high growth area (and) we have a provincial government that is all about housing,” Dollin said. “We are a municipality that is far from mature when it comes to where we’ll be going in the future.”
She pointed to Vaughan at the start of the 1980s. The rural township of 25,000 four decades ago has ballooned to a city of 350,000. Anyone would agree that is a lot of growth, fast. But if Innisfil is to grow like Vaughan, the mayor is determined it won’t follow the same pattern.
Innisfil’s growth has to be “smart,” the mayor insisted.
“With the growth, we also need balance,” Dollin said. “The balance being, you’ve got some densification in areas and then you allow greenspace and agriculture and traditional neighbourhoods in other areas. It’s just not about one big, massive subdivision of massive homes. That way people can stay in our community no matter what type of housing they’re looking for.”
The intensification planned for certain areas of Innisfil -- such as the Orbit development, which saw regular, behind-the-scenes planning during 2023 -- can assist with that, and with any luck, help with issues of affordability that daunt most southern Ontario municipalities. Along with growth, keeping things affordable for residents was at the top of Innisfil councillors’ minds when discussing their biggest challenges for next year.
What could help with affordability is some of the improvements along Innisfil Beach Road. Construction on this part of the roadway wrapped up in November, which Dollin called a “huge accomplishment,” even if it should have happened two years ago.
At the other end of Innisfil Beach Road, near Highway 400, an even longer project may finally be coming to fruition.
“We’ve got a tonne of employment lands unlocking at Innisfil Beach Road and the 400, which has been a goal since I started council in 1994,” Dollin said. “Seeing those big-ticket things move forward is really, really important to me.”
The lack of housing in the immediacy west of Highway 400 has delayed servicing in the area for about two decades, Dollin said, but once pipes are in the ground and operational, it could be a game changer for the municipality, bringing in new revenue streams and providing local employment for local residents that can keep them from heading southbound every morning.
“We want good jobs,” she said. “We’re not looking for a big box retail centre. We’re looking for companies to set up and create jobs and tax revenue.”
It’s also a project that can show the newer councillors that sometimes strategic plans take a long time to be fully realized.
“It was in our Strategic Plan -- the very first one we ever did on council,” Dollin said. “(Some of these ideas my not come to fruition) in this term, but it’s setting us in the right direction.”
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