WATERLOO REGION, — The Fight for Farmland Group is calling into question the statements made by Tony LaMantia, President and CEO of the Waterloo Region Economic Development Corporation, regarding the Wilmot Land Assembly project. Despite his claims of urgency and necessity, the group argues that the facts surrounding this land acquisition tell a different story.
LaMantia recently stated, “Waterloo Region is desperately short of industrial land… the goal was to avoid turning away investments from local and international companies due to a lack of shovel-ready land.” However, the Region’s own studies show sufficient industrial lands to meet employment land demand until 2051 and these same shortage claims were used during the promotion of the East Side Lands project. In 2021, the region promised that the 6,000 acres of East Side Lands would support over 40,000 jobs in the coming decades. To date, those promised jobs have not materialized, and major companies like Dr. Oetker and Schneider’s chose not to develop there.
Dr. Oetker, for example, developed a 43-acre facility elsewhere — land that could easily have been accommodated on the East Side Lands, the Wilmot Industrial Park, Waterloo’s Generation Park or many other Waterloo area industrial sites. Some large sites such as the Wilmot Industrial Park has yet to sell a single parcel in over 20 years. Others have also sat empty and undeveloped for years and even decades.
This begs the question: Why is the region now insisting on the need to seize farmland in Wilmot, when so much industrial land is available elsewhere? The Fight for Farmland Group argues that LaMantia’s claims are recycled from past promises that failed to deliver, leaving residents to wonder why the region is prioritizing farmland destruction over using existing industrial spaces.
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