Lots of political movement on the TMU Medschool. The deal is tasting bitter on costs being revealed to residents: Fortini was wrong about TMU buying the building, they are getting Bramalea Civic gifted to them at no cost + $20Million to refurbish for them.
Lester B Pearson Theatre will be rented out to the City by TMU with this new arrangement. Previously the city was collecting rent from tenants. The Library relocation will be out of taxpayers pocket.
These victories for the city are revealing a lot of shortchanging for residents.
Fortini is also changing his tune from the October
debate video circulating where he gloated about taking credit for showing TMU Bramalea Civic as a potential site which some on council claim wasn't part of the proposed options.
From the Brampton Guardian:
There has been much fanfare since the provincial government announced Brampton as home for the first new medical school in Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in more than a century.
However, details about how much it will cost Brampton taxpayers have emerged since January, when Premier Doug Ford and Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU)
announced the Bramalea Civic Centre as site of the future med school.
In a
news release on Jan. 27, the
city said it will contribute $20 million for renovations to accommodate the school. That’s in addition to the $1 million planning grant council approved in 2021 for TMU, formerly Ryerson University.
The Bramalea Civic Centre is a city-owned property, but TMU won’t be a paying tenant.
Instead, at its
March 1 regular meeting, council voted to
declare approximately 6.3 acres of the roughly eight-acre property — including the Civic Centre building — as surplus land to be “gifted” to the university. The city has not revealed the estimated value of the Civic Centre or the land it sits on.
“We’re gifting the land and we’re gifting a community asset,” Wards 1 and 5 Coun. Rowena Santos told council, while raising several concerns about additional costs.
Santos compared Brampton’s investment in the medical school, which will have far fewer students, to what the City of Markham paid to bring a 4,200-student campus to that city.
She pointed out
Markham contributed $25 million to build an entirely new building, while in addition to gifting TMU the Civic Centre,
Brampton is contributing $20 million for renovations, a $1-million grant, and over $7.2 million to re-accommodate existing lease tenants and city services. The city must also relocate its Chinguacousy Library Branch at a still undetermined cost. The
library underwent a $2 million renovation in 2017.
In addition to relocating leased tenants at the civic centre, the above-mentioned $7,275,000 budget amendment passed by council on March 1 also includes the cost to relocate a Service Brampton location, as well as some city-owned information technology infrastructure and security services. “
Compared to Markham, they’re building new and we’re giving stuff away,” Santos told council.
“It was a surprise to me in terms of why that location was particularly chosen. Many on council had no idea that TMU was interested in that particular location. We were hoping to show them other locations. There was no council direction that was given to showcase the civic centre because that’s a community asset. We had a number of options,” she added in an interview.
The Lester B. Pearson Memorial Theatre is also located at the civic centre and was also recently renovated and reopened in 2018 as part of the city’s Cultural Master Plan.
City staff said part of the agreement with TMU includes keeping the theatre as is and maintaining it as a publicly available space that the
city will now have to lease from the school. But Santos questioned how the future medical school’s activities will affect its availability and usage.
In a heated exchange during the March 1 council meeting, Santos accused Wards 7 and 8 Coun. Pat Fortini of offering the civic centre to TMU as a potential location without consulting the rest of council. Fortini, who did not respond to multiple interview requests, denied that allegation.
He also said TMU threatened to cancel the medical school if a space wasn’t promptly found and approved to meet the university’s planned September 2025 opening timeline, and added TMU chose the civic centre despite being given alternatives.
“I didn’t tell them to go the civic centre. I just brought them around the city. And thank God we got a medical school because it was coming to the last week (or) they were going to pick up and leave. Let’s be clear here, I didn’t force them to go there. My job was to show them around the city and I showed them quite a few locations,” he said.
There has been much fanfare after the provincial government announced Brampton as home for the first new medical school in Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in more than a century.
www.bramptonguardian.com
.jpg)
www.brampton.ca
