The Blue Mountains Community Church (BMCC) wants to expand its facility to accommodate a growing congregation and improve accessibility.
"We found that we needed to make some enhancements, including accessibility (as) we don't have a highly accessible facility,” said Jason Mills, pastor of the BMCC during a recent deputation to Grey County council.
BMCC is located at 219 Bruce St. S. in Thornbury within the municipality of the Town of the Blue Mountains (TBM).
The church would like to add an addition to the front of the building to accommodate a growing congregation, as well as improve nursery and childcare facilities, create more space for youth programs and improve accessibility by adding a vertical lift and improve the washroom facilities.
“We have explored the other options and found that expanding out the front of the building was our best choice,” he explains.
According to Mills, BMCC also looked at relocating the church but found the concept to be too expensive.
“This is a great location for us and, as you probably know, in TBM it's not not easy to find other places or spaces to do the sorts of things that we're doing,” Mills said. “We have a great connection with the school just down the road. It is a great spot and we would love to be able to do what we can with the space.”
The proposed addition would place the church approximately 2.23 metres closer to the road, which requires a setback exemption from the county.
Grey County currently requires a 75-foot setback from the centreline of any county road.
Pat Hoy, director of transportation for Grey County, noted tthe setback request was originally denied because the building is already within the setback parameters.
“Also, because it's right on the corner, if there's ever going to be some widening, or some increase of the radius of that curve, we're probably going to need land there,” Hoy said. “The second issue is that there's a new crosswalk installed north of there near the school, and we just don't want to do anything to kind of impede or future visibility of that crosswalk.”
However, TBM Mayor Alar Soever says the future need to expand the roadway is highly unlikely.
“I don't ever see that there will be a need to widen that road because there are businesses, both in Clarksburg and Thornbury, that are quite close to the road and widening the road would not make sense because you'd have to level both of those business districts,” Soever said.
“Growing up in that area and attending Beaver Valley School, I'm very familiar with this and I just can't envision that road ever being a four-lane road,” said Scott Mackee, council member and mayor of the Township of Chatsworth.
Hoy added that road exchanges, from the county to the lower tier municipalities, will be addressed before the end of the year in a staff report, and Bruce Street will be under consideration to be transferred to TBM.
“I would welcome the consideration of that road exchange,” Soever said.
Although the majority of county council members were prepared to approve the request from BMCC, for due diligence purposes, council directed staff to complete a staff report with additional information on setback request considerations.
The staff report is expected to come before the county council at an upcoming meeting. The next Grey County Council meeting is scheduled for Oct. 8.