CENTRE WELLINGTON – Mayor Shawn Watters is concerned about a lack of housing options in the township and he thinks the business community should be too.
That’s what attendees heard at the Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce’s annual mayor’s breakfast, the first one held at full capacity in-person since 2020.
It was also Watters’ first mayor’s breakfast since he was elected in fall 2022 and he opened his remarks by singing the praises of the Centre Wellington community calling living there a wonderful experience in the more than 30 years he’s lived there.
But change is on the horizon as provincial and community pressures mean the township will grow in population.
“We’re going from about 30,000 to 60,000 over the next 15 to 20 years, that’s a substantive impact in our community,” Watters said, referring to provincially-mandated population growth in Wellington County with a majority of it happening in Elora and Fergus.
“My preference would be to share some of that growth within the county but we have the resources here to be able to take on that growth.”
On top of that, he noted the province’s ambitious plan to build 1.5 million homes over 10 years and Centre Wellington will have its share.
“That’s building a community the size of Fergus every 20 days,” Watters said. “That is a huge number, we have never built 1.5 million homes in a 10 year period. The most we’ve done is about 850,000.”
But the mayor is confident this will be done and it will be up to the local government to decide what this growth looks like and how much of that growth is out on farmland, up in taller buildings or intensified on existing lots and boundaries.
On that topic, he said his number one concern was a lack of housing options available and the communities consisting exclusively of million dollar homes no longer work in Elora and Fergus.
“You should be concerned that if your kids don’t have opportunity for housing or family members or people in the community don’t have an opportunity for housing this is going to affect you in a really negative way,” Watters said.
“Your restaurants are not open as long, your retailers are not open, we’re building an industrial park, you can’t get labour there.”
He said the crowd, who he noted was made up mostly of business owners, all likely had stories of difficulties finding employees because they can’t move to the Centre Wellington and won’t commute.
The best solution in his view is for a more balanced housing approach to get more attainable housing.
“A community is not just single family dwellings, it’s a multitude of different housing opportunities out there,” Watters said. “To me that’s really important for our community and for a successful community and also for the labour pool.”
