Tay Valley Councillor questions the township planner over ‘group home’

Jeff Green | Feb 21, 2024

At a Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday, February 19, members of Tay Valley Council were joined by an unusually large contingent of residents, most from the Maberly area.

The residents were there to hear more about plans for the proposed Mani Daniels Centre in the hamlet. Spencer Kell, and the Love Soluble Not For Profit Corporation, had made an application to council for a zoning amendment in order to be able to house 8 residents at a time, for up to two years, in a house that is located at the junction of Maberly Main Street and the Elphin-Maberly Road in the middle of the hamlet. The residents would be men who would be working towards recovery from Substance Addiction Disorder.

One group that would be a focus for the home would be men who had been charged who are more suitably located in Maberly under a bail order, than in jail while waiting for their charges to be dealt with by the courts.

Five days before the scheduled meeting, after meeting with Kell, a Love Soluble board member, and the township solicitor, Tay Valley Planner Noelle Reeve came to the conclusion that the new use for the house did not require re-zoning after all, and the re-zoning application was withdrawn.

In a report to council that was part of the agenda package at the February 19th meeting, Reeves detailed how the matter was being dealt with through an application got a minor variance to be dealt with by the township’s Committee of Adjustment at their next meeting on March 18th, at 5pm at the township office on Harper Road.

At the meeting on February, a number of concerned Maberly residents, some of them unaware that the public meeting on the re-zoning application had been cancelled, attended the Committee of the Whole meeting.

At the meeting itself, a number of questions were raised about Reeve’s report about the planning rationale behind the change.

One of the most active questioners was Andrew Kendrick, a first term Councillor from South Sherbrooke ward, where Maberly is located.