Mississauga council has unanimously endorsed a unique citizen-driven plan for the sprawling Lakeview lands that could transform the area around a former coal-fired power plant into a thriving $2 billion waterfront community.
Yesterday's vote was witnessed by hundreds of residents, who jammed council chambers and applauded repeatedly.
The council resolution calls on the province to ensure that a gas-powered plant won't replace the coal-powered one that once thrust four smokestacks high into the sky south of Lakeshore Rd. between Cawthra and Dixie Rds. The stacks came down in June 2006, the rest of the hulking plant a year later.
The industrial area the citizen plan envisions redeveloping totals about 200 hectares, nearly 80 of which the province owns through Ontario Power Generation.
The plan by the 800-member Lakeview Ratepayers Association extends existing waterfront trails and parklands and adds a major feature such as an aquarium or pier. It also envisions doubling the area's population by adding new medium-rise towers – enough people to support extending the TTC streetcar line into Mississauga, from the current Long Branch terminus all the way to Hurontario St.
"This is a historic day for the City of Mississauga," said Jim Tovey, president of the residents' association and a driving force behind the project, along with University of Toronto landscape professor and architect John Danahy.
The crowd cheered as Danahy showed his computer-modelled Lakeview Legacy Plan, and as councillors proclaimed one after another that they would do all they could to make it a reality.
Tovey and Danahy used Google Earth and mapping data from the University of Toronto to come up with the plan, which they said involved thousands of hours of work and input from residents.
"This is our last opportunity to create a vibrant waterfront," said Councillor Carmen Corbasson. "It belongs to us and we must take advantage of it."
Some of the warmest cheers came near the start of the meeting, when Mayor Hazel McCallion buoyed hopes with a letter she'd just received from Energy Minister Gerry Phillips.
Phillips wrote that while Lakeview remains a potential site, OPG's estimate for energy needed in the southwest GTA until 2013 was an extra 850 megawatts.
McCallion interpreted that to mean that another gas-fired power plant in Mississauga proposed by Sithe Global – which has received regulatory approval for a site east of Winston Churchill Blvd., between Royal Windsor Dr. and Lakeshore Rd. – could easily handle the demand. The estimate, she suggested, could also eliminate the need for Eastern Power's gas-fired plant near Dundas St. E. and Dixie Rd.
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