Oxford County To Finance Zorra To Purchase The Former Maple Leaf Plant

Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 07:48

The Township of Zorra is ready to take the next steps to purchase the lands surrounding the former Maple Leaf Plant. Last Week the County of Oxford agreed to help finance the sale.

ZORRA TOWNSHIP - The County of Oxford has agreed to help Zorra Township purchase the land at the former Maple Leaf Plant.

Oxford will help Zorra with their financing for the purchase. Mayor Marcus Ryan says it will not take very long to pay that money back to the County.

"Zorra is preceding with a conditional offer of purchase to Maple Leaf, to purchase the land and re-develop them into housing needs and commercial and industrial needs that our community needs, but the purchase price is more than Zorra has in the bank and we are certainly not going to go to residents to finance millions of dollars of land purchase, so we approached the County and the County was great to work with, in terms of financing that deal. It is going to be a short term finance, because the intention is the Township will purchase the land from Maple Leaf and then sell it on to a developer that is going to develop it in a way that the Township wants, so we just need that financing bridge to cover a couple of months in time, while the deal all happens."

Ryan says the details of the agreement have not been made public at this time.

"I'm not able to say right now what the price tag is, because it is all in close session. There is an amount that we have asked for financing on from the County that is in excess of $6 million dollars, that would cover more than the purchase price, there would be financing contingencies in there. The details of what the Township is going to pay for the land and what the Township is going to sell the land for is not able to say right now, but hopefully by the end of October or early November, we should be in a position where all of the deals have closed and all that information can be made public."

Ryan says the Township wanted to make sure those lands didn't sit vacant, after Maple Leaf decided to close up shop and leave the community.

"When an industrial site closes, it is a bit of a nightmare for the community, I mean people are out of jobs obviously and the next step in that is, do you have an abandoned site, weeds growing up out of the cracks, broken windows, unintended uses for the property that is abandoned. So the next step is, how do you get rid of that and what do you get rid of it with and as long as the municipality doesn't own it, it could be any developer coming in, to propose developing it, in any way they want. Our staff in Zorra identified potential benefits to developing it in a specific way for Thamesford and the Township as a whole and that would be to meet some housing needs that are missing, along with some commercial and economic development potential."

The land sale would be for 120 acres and we expect to have another update on this story in the next couple of weeks.