Top 10 issues that residents care about

One of a local councillor's responsibilities should be listening to his or her constituents. I've started a discussion on what I think are 10 issues that residents in the Hawthorne Village area care about.

Top 10 list of issues

The thread starts off with my top 10 but then asks for and receives lists from others. I would like your input. If you live in Hawthorne Village, please look at this list and reply with your own list of issues in priority.

If you'd rather not post your issue list online then you can also email it to me at rick@dilorenzo.com

Milton Town Hall - Special Council & Commitee Meetings

I was at Town Hall on monday to attend the Special Council as well as the Administration and Planning Standing Committee meetings. If you have the time and interest, nothing beats attending town meetings in person. The ratified meeting minutes that are published weeks after tend to be short and sometimes dull to read in comparison to attending in person.

Monday's meeting lasted some time, with informal conversations both before and after official council meetings started. Below are some highlights that may be of interest to residents of Ward 7 and Hawthorne Villagers in general.

• Proposed new Dentist Office on the north-east corner of Kennedy Circle & Thompson (current location has a house there). The property would change to have a small parking lot in front, with the 'medical clinic' further back. You can see the full proposal online. It would include a small wellness center (physiotherapy, aesthetic services, massage, etc) as well.
  
• New photo-id requirements for the 2010 municipal election. Photo ID was not a requirement in previous municipal elections.
  
• Discussion and renderings of the Milton Sports Center Expansion. The renderings were projected onto the big screens so everyone could see (not available online yet). They're currently about 5 million under-budget but there remains some possible 'tweaking' to ensure it's 'world class' which could still cause some future dollars. A good portion of the budget for this came from the federal "Build Canada Program - Infrastructure Stimulus Fund" so there was some comments about whether the federal government might want a portion of the under-budget surplus back (for Milton's benefit, I hope not).
  
• There was a lively discussion about online internet voting and whether it would be possible in time for the 2010 municipal elections. Paul Scherer (Councillor ward 4) seemed interested if it was possible for 2010. Troy McHaig (Town Clerk) seemed less enthused and pointed out there was no line in the 2010 budget for online voting, plus it would be short notice for this year's election. Paul asked what about for 2014 and Troy seemed to give a guarded maybe. I'm taking liberties here in shortening what was an interesting back and forth.
  
  Some points about online internet voting in Ontario.
  
  • Over 16 municipalities did some form of online voting in 2006
  • Markham (pop. over 300,000) added online voting in 2006 for only $42,000
  • It's worked well from a cost perspective when online voting is spread out over multiple days prior to election day.
  • Convenience is the biggest benefit stated by residents in Markham for online voting
  • Security is the biggest concern to be allayed for residents to vote online.

There were other issues discussed (transit in particular), this is just a brief write-up of a few. In future meetings I might bring a laptop, as I can type in notes much faster than I can write.

Hi, my name is Rick Di Lorenzo and I'm running for Milton local councillor of Ward 7.

October 25, 2010 will be the day of Milton's next municipal election. Due to recent ward boundary changes, this election will be significantly different. If you look at the old ward map for Milton the new residential development had less than 1/4th representation on town council. The areas comprising Hawthorne Village were in the old ward 1 which also included rural areas of Milton.

Old ward map


In the new ward map system Hawthorne Village is now spread out along wards 1, 6, 7 and 8. Hawthorne Villagers will be voting in wards that will end up comprising almost 50% of the new town council. Keep in mind I'm including the Hollybank, Jasper Village & Coscorp communities in my definition of "Hawthorne Village". Basically the part of town where people commonly refer to themselves as living within the Hawthorne Village area.

New ward map



There will be a good chance that this time councillors will be elected who actually live within Hawthorne Village.

Map of where town councillors currently live <-- Thanks to Zeeshan Hamid for creating this map.

Milton does have some excellent local and regional councillors who have helped people in Hawthorne Village (Colin Best is a good example). But it would better to have representation on council of people who actually live in the newly developed areas of Milton. The perspective of someone living in Hawthorne Village will be different than a person living in older parts of Milton.

The Hawthorne Village community in Milton is comprised of Hawthorne Village (HV), Hawthorne Village on the Escarpment (HVE) and Hawthorne Village Vista (HVV). To learn more about Hawthorne Village visit http://www.hawthornevillager.com/phpbb/ That's the discussion forum for Hawthorne Villagers and people who are interested in moving there. The below entries were my original blog posts talking about our personal experiences in buying a home in Hawthorne Village.

We're less than 3 weeks from closing! Our house is looking good from the front. They still have to paint the columns and other parts in front of the house, but that should be easy.

Our major concerns are the bricks in the back of the house (they used the wrong color bricks in spots somehow) and that our kitchen & bathroom cabinets are still missing. Aya seems to be late with cabinets in many houses, with others reporting some quality problems with cabinet doors. We're really hoping that Mattamy will finish on time. Our building team leader Stelian says not to worry, but it's still stressful with the Oct 5th closing date fast approaching.

Mattamy's also announced new 56' homes being released on Sept 26th, you can read more about this here http://www.hawthornevillager.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1509

As mentioned in the discussion forums Mattamy released more 36' & 46' lots on July 9th along with price increases. I noticed Mattamy stopped updating their website for Hawthorne Village? The 46' lots and townhomes appear as "sold out" online which is not true.

I sometimes receive emails from people asking when I think Mattamy will be releasing new lots in Hawthorne Village. My answer is always to please call their Sales Office at (905) 875-2692. Now that we have our own home being built I don't keep track of future releases. You should also not trust what you see on Mattamy's website for lot availability because as mentioned it's fairly out-of-date.

The sales office is still saying they may release more 56' lots in a couple weeks to those that are interested.

If interested in other Mattamy locations outside of Milton, call the sales office for the location you are interested in. The phone numbers are listed on their main website. One exception being Burlington, for some reason they don't have a phone number or link to that location anymore. But someone emailed me this notice of 36' lots being released there on Saturday July 23rd.

Here are 4 additional Hawthorne Villager blogs that have sprouted up on the internet.

Bonnie Tiju&Sophia GregoryL J&L

There is also a website for the Hawthorne Village Medical Clinic being opened soon in July 2005. Dr. Tim McKee posted information on this in the discussion forums.

Our house is currently being built! The Senior Builder for our phase is Stelian Priescu with our building team being Jeff Rideout & Michael Hawkins. We were happy to meet both Stelian & Jeff earlier this year at "Mattamy University" where they discussed the building process. Hoping to post pictures soon of our Tothburg home under construction. We close in the first week of October, 2005.

Geoffrey Peart has a cool personal blog called "Coast of Araska" where he also has some postings & pictures of his home buying experience in Hawthorne Village. His home page is at gcpeart.evermeet.org. I liked this posting of his myself. Geoffrey if you read this are you a user in the forums? You mention them on your blog but don't see any postings from any userids that resemble your name.

Hawthorne Village Pub Night to meet your neighbours.

Place : Charley Fitzwhiskey's Tap & Eatery
Location : 55 Ontario St N, Milton, Ontario
Date&Time : Saturday, September 11 at 4 PM

Who's invited? People moving (or recently moved) to Hawthorne Village in Phase 11, 12, and 13, plus anyone else who's interested in attending (i.e. fellow Hawthorne Villagers).

Look at the "Pub Night" topic in the Discussion forum for more information!

Nick & Trish Dorak have their own personal website where they've been nice to post information on the Phase 11 Mooreside Corner townhouse they purchased at Hawthorne Village. Under "See the progress" there's pictures/descriptions of the progress up to date of their new home being constructed (it's a big page though so will take awhile to load depending on your internet speed).

On the topic of our own Phase 12 purchase, our lawyer has reviewed the purchase agreement and so far has advised us to request changes to cap the closing costs, and also delete the forced early closing clause. We also wanted to change where it says we're forced to accept a mirror image/reverse layout if it's required (they can't tell us if it will be) but so far Mattamy won't budge on that :-( So we're just hoping our house won't be required to be a mirror image, we won't really know until closer to the design centre structural upgrade appointment which by then will be too late to backout of the purchase if we were so inclined. So we're just crossing our fingers on that one. Although other people who live in mirror image houses say you get used to it fairly quickly and the only reason it initially seems wierd to us is because we're so used to looking at the un-mirrored floor plans.

Once again, join the Hawthorne Village forums! There's more information there being posted about Hawthorne Village.

This information has already been posted in the Hawthorne Village forums but will recap it here in the Blog.

(1) Toronto Star News article about the June 21-25 Mattamy Hawthorne Village lineup in the July 3rd Saturday edition. You can view the article online here.
(2) New 85 acre park being built near Hawthorne Village. Here's a PDF version of the Park Map. Here's a Milton Champion newspaper article about the future park.
(3) Map showing future location of the Walmart & Canadian Tire being built by James Snow Pky & Steeles Ave.
(4) More Hawthorne Village line-up pictures from June 21-25 provided by Tim & Sandra.
(5) Today Mattamy started to call people who have "reservations" to come in and get their Purchase Agreements. This pertains to people who did reservations earlier because at the time Mattamy didn't have purchase agreements finalized yet. Dave & Laurie (#1's in line) did theirs today.

Also it's interesting to mention that from August 2003 to July 2004, Mattamy has increased the prices of their homes in Hawthorne Village by about 10%. Here's an example using the Tothburg II Elevation C that we've been tracking.

August, 2003	January 19, 2004	June 22-25, 2004	June 26, 2004	June 27, 2004
$376,990	$382,990	$394,990	$404,990	$414,990

It's now July 5th, and the Tothburg 2, along with other 56' lots are sold out. I wonder if Mattamy will increase the prices again this month when they say more 56's will be released? Supply and demand. We're happy that we reserved our lot when we did. But it's still surprising how fast the prices have changed. The others (semis, towns, 36s, 46s, etc..) have had similar price increases around the same range.

The "post comments" section has been changed into a Discussion Forum. It makes it easier to have interaction and multiple messages than the old comment post method did. So please join and post your experiences or questions! I'm using the free open-source software called "phpBB" to do this. Most postings here will now be related to Design Centre/upgrades, information about Hawthorne Village, progress on our house construction, etc. Less about actually "buying" the home since that parts over now for us! But this "Blog" may eventually take a second place to the new "Discussion Forum" as time goes by.