East Wellington Community Services (EWCS) will be moving to a property owned by the Rockwood United Church.
The Sept. 21 Guelph-Eramosa council meeting included a public meeting to discuss rezoning the property at 107 Harris Street in Rockwood, owned by the church, to institutional use from village low density residential.
Ultimately council approved the rezoning and passed the bylaw, opening the door for the EWCS to move into the space.
“This is a fantastic use in our community,” Mayor Chris White said at the meeting. “Right now they’ve got the building on Church Street, this place is a lot more flexible … gives you the parking that you need.
“Remember that these folks are providing a lot of services that the County of Wellington and the social safety nets do not cover but (are) absolutely critical to our communities.”
EWCS proposed uses include: administrative counselling, children’s activities and clothing/food distribution activities, said township planning associate Kelsey Lang.
Stephanie Conway, manager of marketing and fund development for EWCS, said the move-in date is not yet determined.
“We’re working on renovations with the church for the inside of the house,” she said. “I can’t give you a definite date at this point until we have all of that finished.”
Conway said EWCS has outgrown its current location at 106 Church Street and a new space was needed to expand services.
“We’re hoping to have a community computer for job searches, doing resumes, that kind of thing, in the main office,” she said.
However, at this point she said all the programming will remain the same.
Lang explained that when considering an application to rezone a property, planners look to see if there’s enough of the zone that the application would be taking away from, whether there is somewhere else the proposed tenant could go, and how the application would impact site-specific regulations.
After reviewing the application, Lang said the planning department recommended approval for the special provision to permit the social service establishment and to recognize existing setbacks even though they comply with low-density residential zoning and not necessarily institutional zoning.
