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Annual General Meeting Results and Community Update

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• April 20, 2017
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Preserve Thornhill Woods Association held their Annual General Meeting on March 30th and a number of residents who were unable to attend have asked us to post an update on what was covered during the meeting.

As many of you know, PTWA is the official Ratepayers Association for the community of Thornhill Woods. To qualify and maintain this status with the City of Vaughan, we are required to follow a number of rules including the election of our board of directors once every three years. We therefore kicked off the meeting with a quick recap of the purpose and mandate of our Ratepayers Association and followed this by an election for the 2017 PTWA board of directors. Each of the candidate board members was introduced and the election process was completed. We were pleased to add two new residents to the board and we expect to have our first meeting with the new board in the coming weeks. The meeting was attended by approximately 150 residents and it was great to see many new faces in the crowd.

The second part of the meeting was focused on providing an update to the community on the latest status of the Jaffari Village development application. As we have posted previously, the applicant submitted a revised application to the City of Vaughan in February 2017. We provided the following overview on the revised proposal to the residents who attended the meeting:

• 60 three level town-homes (42 will be offered for sale and 18 will be retained by the applicant for rental)
• 6 floor seniors building with 149 units
• 8 floor condominium building with 134 units
• A future high school and parking garage that will be built at a later date
• An increased 11m buffer between the houses on Bathurst Glen and Ner Israel Drive
• A public nature trail along the conservation lands
• Apple Blossom will be opened up to allow a second entrance into the facility
• An additional exit at Bathurst Street (right turn only) will be provided for the two buildings
• The density and number of people expected to live there is more or less the same as in previous proposals
• There is a parking garage proposed but it is unclear when it will be built
• The Vaughan Glen heritage building will be moved to one of either two locations on the property

After PTWA received the revised application, we were asked by the City of Vaughan to review the revised proposal and to provide feedback. The following week PTWA sent over a detailed letter to the City of Vaughan outlining a number of concerns that we believe still need to be addressed by the applicant. We were quite clear during the community meeting. While we are pleased that the applicant has made an effort to address a number smaller issues, they have still not adequately address our four main concerns. These include density, traffic, parking and the increased burden on our schools and infrastructure.

We concluded our formal presentation by going over next steps. The next major milestone is that the City of Vaughan has confirmed a meeting with PTWA on April 21 (tomorrow) to review our concerns and to discuss potential strategies for addressing these concerns.

The last 45 minutes of the meeting was left open to answer questions from the community. Based on the questions and the feedback we received, our residents are clearly frustrated by the length of time that this application has been under review and by the applicant’s unwillingness to compromise on the density of the development.

We will post an update after we meet with the City of Vaughan tomorrow. PTWA continues to track this file on a weekly basis and we will provide immediate updates as we receive new information.

To help us fund these and future activities, please consider a donation to the Preserve Thornhill Woods Association.