Leamington Mayor John Paterson is urging other municipalities to move cautiously towards reducing or waiving development charges.
Essex Town Council is considering following in Leamington's footsteps in waiving its development fees. Paterson tells BlackburnNews.com his municipality felt it had serious cause to waive its fees for three years.
"We felt we needed to kickstart our economy again," says Paterson. "We had our reasons to do that, and that's because of the Heinz closure. It's been, the last eight to ten years, we've had minuscule amounts of new building going on when it came to residential."
Paterson says waiving development charges took two years of debate and a solid bank account.
"We had the money in reserves. We had the rainy day account. We had been saving for a long time for a rainy day and it was pouring," says Paterson. "We're using that money to reimburse the development charge account."
Paterson says his municipality has seen three subdivision approvals with four homes built so far and adds two industrial developments are also moving forward.