Outgoing York chair reflects
Moving On

NRU
April 16, 2014
By Edward LaRusic

Outgoing York Region chair, Bill Fisch, says that growth and transportation infrastructure were issues when he became chair in 1997 and remain a challenge as he exits in 2014, but he leaves with no regrets.

“When I first moved to York Region, behind [my house] was some cows and some horses and some rural areas in Thornhill. Now of course, most of that’s gone and it’s now commercial and residential buildings,” said Fisch, in an interview with NRU.

“We’ve certainly grown up in the last 20 years.”

York Region has changed significantly in the past 17 years. The population has grown from about 700,000 in 1997 to about 1.1-million in 2014. The Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe projects the population to rise to 1.79 million by 2041.

“We are moving from what was once a bedroom community to a true city-urban region. And that was a huge change.”

For the last five terms - the last three of which he ran unopposed - he has watched York Region grow as important provincial legislation such as the Places to Grow Act and the Greenbelt Plan were introduced.

Fisch announced in September of 2012 that he was retiring from public service. NRU spoke to him about the challenges of 1997 and those the region will have to face beyond 2014, about his biggest triumph and regret, and what comes next for Bill Fisch.

What was the region like when you became chair in 1997?

“In 1997 we were 700,000 people. We had literally just taken on 400 employees from the provincial government in a number of different services, including health services and social services, housing services, and we ended up taking transit services as well. So all of a sudden we went from a fair-sized organization to quite a large-sized organization literally overnight.”

What are the planning challenges that the region faced in 1997?

“It’s always about growth and transportation, they’re the two areas and they go hand in hand. In the past, in the ‘90s and the ‘80s and ‘70s [planning] was primarily related to the car. We had and probably still have the highest proportion of four-car families in North America. Our growth and planning was based on everyone having a vehicle and driving to the corner store.”

What are some of the planning challenges ahead in York Region?

“Our growth plan still requires us to grow to another half a million people in the next 20-25 years. So the challenge of the past will remain the challenge of the future. Most of our development is going to be along our major transit corridors, and they’re going to be more dense developments than ever before. Those developments that are close to or backing onto our single-family home developments, those will be challenged, because people will have a hard time accepting that there will be larger, taller buildings on the main corridors.”

What has been your biggest success as chair?

“One of my platforms when I was elected chair in 1997 was to change the whole transit culture in the region. I wanted to combine all of our transit systems. We were able in my first term of office to amalgamate all of our systems into one, and called it York Region Transit. From that we were able to really think very, very big, and we lobbied very dramatically in the early 2000s with the federal and provincial governments to get hundreds of millions of dollars to expand our system. We started with the Viva system and that led to the possibility of subways into York Region. We lobbied to get at least one subway, and that’s one that’s being built as we speak, up to the [Vaughan metropolitan centre]. We’re still working on the other one which is as important - in some respects more important now - and that’s the extension of the Yonge subway up to our Highway 7. So we were able to get support over the last seven or eight years of $5-billion. Without that support from the federal and provincial levels, there wouldn’t have been anything. It would have been impossible.”

What has been the hardest decision you had to make as York chair?

“I think pushing forward on our pipe projects into Durham. The difficult we had with that and the decisions I had to make to push to forward, whether other municipalities liked it or not. I can tell you that was quite the battle. It was a four-year, almost five-year battle. It was not easy, it was quite difficult.”

“The next - more difficult really - was on the transit side during the strike. While the strike was not against York Region, it was against the contractors who run our transit system - it’s all privatized - but I had to be the one to get out there pretty vociferously to push all of the contractors and unions to come to an agreement. That decision I took not to back down to either side and allow the strike to continue until they could come to a conclusion on it was a difficult one.”

What’s next for Bill Fisch?

“I’ve been involved [in politics] for 26 years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not as young as some people think I am. I’ll spend four or five months in Florida starting in December of this year, and then I’ll come home, and decide what, if anything, I want to do in the future. I’ve not made any particular plans. A number of people have told me that they’ve been interested in talking with me about some future endeavour, but at this point I’ve not decided where I want to go and what I want to do.”

“I’m still here for seven more months, and I can tell you that I’ve not stopped. There are some things I want to finish up before I’m done and I’m hoping we can. Regretfully I won’t be here for finishing the [Vaughan subway extension], which will still happen in two years, and hopefully I’ll be called back for that since I had a pretty big hand in it. But I’m very content with what we’ve accomplished over the last couple of decades. I’ve been at the region now for 20 years, and I can tell you that regardless of what happens in the future and what I decide to do, I’ll be able to look back at York Region and say things worked well. I’m proud of what we accomplished.”