Development of the former Guelph Reformatory site may be on the horizon.
Months after the province sold a large portion of the planned Guelph Innovation District (GID) lands to a local developer, Mayor Cam Guthrie says plans to put the former reformatory property, which makes up the rest of the GID plan, up for sale are in the works.
“It’s coming very soon, I’ve been told,” he said of sale efforts, responding to a question about the city's GID plan, posed during the annual Guelph Chamber of Commerce Mayor’s State of the City Address on Thursday morning. “There’s a lot of natural heritage there that cannot be built on.
“There’s a real desire to work with the province to see how much of that we can keep for public space as well so the public can enjoy it for generations to come.”
Efforts to reach Infrastructure Ontario, which oversees the sale of surplus provincial assets such as the former reformatory lands weren’t immediately successful.
This past December, the province sold 328.6 acres of land, consisting of the Agricultural Research Institute of Ontario's former Guelph Turfgrass Institue and former Wellington Detention Centre property, to Fusion Homes for an undisclosed amount.
City plans for the GID include a mix of employment, residential, commercial and natural heritage uses. The GID lands are bordered by Stone Road East, Victoria Road South and York Road.
It includes about 100 acres of protected natural areas.
Last summer city council approved a motion to launch the process of protecting specific features of the former reformatory property under the Ontario Heritage Act, as well as a study that could cover the area as a whole.
Designation of the individual features has since been completed and efforts to study the larger area have begin.
"Following the completion of the background work – public consultation will begin," wrote Krista Walkey, the city's general manager of planning and building services, wrote in an email to GuelphToday.
The former Guelph reformatory lands consist of about 222 acres of land that include a set of buildings constructed in the 1910s and 1920s for detention and rehabilitation purposes.
Though the province owns much of the original reformatory property, it no longer owns all of it. Through the years parcels have been sold off, with pieces now owned by the City of Guelph, along with Cargill Meat Solutions.
The reformatory was fully decommissioned in 2001 and the property has been vacant since 2014, when the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services completely left the site. With no identified uses for it, the provincial government has declared the property to be surplus.
