The Town of Vermilion is considering selling the Midtown Medical Clinic.
Read more: Shining a light on homeschooling academy
The item was presented to council at the Dec. 2 regular council meeting after an external appraisal of the building was completed in September 2024. The estimated property value ranges between $625,000 and $675,000.
The town reviewed its assets and operations and is looking to sell the building as it no longer wishes to be a landlord.
“Upon review of assets and operations, administration is recommending the Town of Vermilion dispose of the medical clinic building from our asset listing,” said Marilyn Lavoie, the town’s director of corporate services. “The municipality does not wish to be a landlord anymore and maintain the rental buildings and maintain the leases and finding tenants. We feel it’s probably best suited for a private owner as opposed to a municipality.”
Administration informed council the building will likely need repairs and upgrades in the near future.
“The town does maintain the building and all the costs with maintaining that building,” said CAO Shannon Harrower. “We recoup some of those costs via the rent payment, but it does not offset the town’s costs entirely.”
Council expressed concern that the building’s use could change after the sale.
Coun. Kellen Snelgrove asked what control the town would have to maintain the building as a medical building.
“I think by giving up control, we’re putting, possibly at risk, our retention of medical professionals,” he said.
Harrower says while the new owner could change the use of the building, there’s been interest in the building.
“The new owner could change the use of that building if they so wish. They would have to do a development permit,” she said. “We also have had interest from people within that community in the building, however, in accordance with our policy, it has to go to public bid.”
The building is currently zoned as commercial district one.
“The purpose of the district is to promote commercial development appropriate for the central business district of the municipality involving fairly high-density development,” said Harrower.
“Permitted uses is alcohol sales, banks, cannabis sales, coin laundry, home office, household appliance sales, offices, personal service shops, restaurants, retails stores. Then, discretionary uses is everything from apartments to truck sales, bowling alleys, clinics, clubs, lodges, dance studios, parking lots, music studios, hotels, quasi-public buildings, public utilities, service stations, the list is quite vast.”
Coun. Paul Conlon wants to see the building rezoned before it’s sold.
“I wouldn’t be in favour of the sale until further work has been done, such as rezoning it,” he said, noting he’s in favour of selling it, he just doesn’t want to see its use change.
Harrower explained the process to change the zoning could take a while.
“We’d have to bring back the land use bylaw. That would have to go to a public hearing and go through all that process,” she said. “It’s going to be a long one. If we’re going to do a review of the land use bylaw, it’ll be an extensive undertaking by administration.
“We likely wouldn’t change just this, we’d probably do a comprehensive review of the entirety of the bylaw and make updates as required.”
She said it could take a year to review the document and conduct the necessary public hearings.
Mayor Robert Snow asked if an assessment has been done on the building and what the cost of keeping the building is, timeframe for replacing the roof and doing the required upgrades.
“It’s very expensive. We have done those studies and a lot of those things need to be done in the short-term,” said Harrower.
Snow says while he likes the idea of keeping the building for its intended use, he says there’s been success in the community with physicians finding their own homes.
“I appreciate the idea of keeping the building because we want to keep practitioners here, but we do have one physician right now who has chosen to have her own building and she’s been very successful at that,” said Snow.
He spoke to prior experience on the health-care retention committee and his concerns of the building’s age.
“My concern is, it’s an aging building. It’s going to start costing us more and more,” he said. “When I was on the health-care retention committee, the doctors had, at that point, told me they’ve outgrown that building. They want renovations to add more rooms in there.”
Harrower explained it could be possible to stipulate in the sale to keep the building in its current use.
“I’ll have to do a little bit of digging into whether or not the provisions of our sale agreement could stipulate that the building needs to remain for that particular use,” she said.
Snelgrove said he couldn’t make an informed decision without further information being brought back such as the detailed financials of the building.
“At this time, I would vote against this given my current information,” he said. “I have concerns about it transferring over to a different use, I’m not sure if I want to open up the land use bylaw.”
Harrower talked about potentially doing parcel rezoning on the building but says the process is more complicated than it appears.
“Because it’s the land use bylaw and it affects the neighbouring areas and the development, it has to go to a public hearing,” she said. “So, it would have to be opened up in its entirety for feedback from the community.
“You could do a parcel zoning, but this is also within the C1 commercial district, so it impacts all the properties within that C1 commercial district. We’d have to make a change to that area to not only remove it from that district, but rezone it.”
Council eventually passed a motion for administration to bring back all the costs on the Midtown Medical Clinic as well as the assessment from 2024.
Read more: Lot prices set in Vermilion
