Barry’s Bay – Looking more like a lump of coal, it wasn’t exactly the Christmas gift that the mayor of Madawaska Valley Township wanted or expected. But just before Christmas, Mayor Mark Willmer found out about, as he said, “the collapse of King’s Landing.”
King’s Landing was to be a residential housing development that MV Township had high hopes for getting under way this year, and that the township had already green-lighted. Undoubtedly, the largest housing development ever proposed for Barry’s Bay, it included 70 units of mixed housing, everything from one-bedroom apartments to semi-detached single-family homes. They were all to be built near St. Francis Memorial Hospital along Siberia Road in Barry’s Bay.
The mayor said the collapse of King’s Landing was probably his single biggest disappointment of 2023, his first year as mayor.
“I really had optimism in that (it) would be a start, and it would spur other growth,” he said last week when interviewed by Sean Conway for The Opeongo Line podcast and where he first made pubic the news of the King’s Landing collapse.
One of the mayor’s major concerns in the past year has been how to bring a variety of new housing units into the area. He said that effort included more than just low-income affordable housing, but also housing that would allow new employees who have found jobs in the township to move here permanently, and to allow local retirees who no longer wanted to maintain their own private homes to stay in the area in an apartment or condominium.
Mayor Willmer said up until two or three weeks ago King’s Landing was all ready to proceed, but he received a telephone call from one of its private-sector development team in mid-December. Shortly afterwards, the mayor met with that individual and was told that King’s Landing couldn’t proceed as planned.
“He made it very clear that he was completely satisfied with how the township had operated, and that it had nothing to do with the township,” the mayor said. “But one of his partners had passed away, and he was really the one with a lot of the money.”
Mayor Willmer went on to say that, though the King’s Landing project appears to have died, “there is still an opportunity there that he (the developer he spoke with) is willing to explore and will look in different directions to see what they can do.”
The mayor said he still has hopes that some semblance of the defunct project might be salvaged as Barry’s Bay remains attractive to other developers. He mentioned several other, smaller housing developments that are expected to get underway in the coming year.
“We do have small, infill, apartment units that are starting to occur within the community which I think are needed,” he added.
One such project includes a six-unit apartment complex slated for Inglis St.
The collapse of King’s Landing is only one of a number of challenges facing the mayor and the Madawaska Valley Township council. Everything from a new push by Renfrew County to impose $4,700 building development fees on new construction to the very real financial effects of climate change that continue to impact local governments. There is also the pressing problem of the Bark Lake waste disposal site that is quickly being filled faster than expected.
About the only good news, at least for local ratepayers, was the hope the mayor expressed in the year-end interview to keep any proposed tax increases for 2024 to something below the national inflation rate. Though he still has to wait on the township treasurer’s recommendation, Mayor Willmer is hopeful that any such increase will be kept below 2.5 percent.
