Saugeen Shores reports a “land-office” rush for building permits to beat the new development charges in the municipality. The new development charges for the municipality went into effect on March 4th. The by-law initially means a 2008 flat charge of four-thousand dollars per residential build. Chief Building Official Jim Bell says — in obvious anticipation of those new charges — the dollar value of development up to the end of February 2008 was roughly seven times that of the same time in 2007. Bell says the actual dollar value to the end of February 2007 was approximately 3 million 800-thousand dollars while to the end of February in 2008 that figure soared to more than 22-million 800 thousand dollars. Bell says 53 new homes and 9 multi-residential permits were applied for and issued to the end of February 2008 and that’s in dramatic contrast to last year when they had just 11 new home and one multiresidential applications. He says, again, the main reason those numbers are so inflated in terms of single family dwellings is because developers and potential builders submitted their applications in an effort to get in ahead of the new development charges. Bell says he expects this month to also show an increase over last year with several permit applications for new dwellings on the desk already . However, he expects things to tail off in April with the big push to beat development charges over. Bell still expects this year to be busier than last year with the number dwelling applications expected to increased, with a large request for townhouse style development and with some large commercial projects anticipated as well.
