Go, Go, GO station

While media attention was focused on police takedowns, assault charges and cries of corruption in Oshawa’s council chambers last week, a far more important issue was back on the radar in the Motor City.

The new GO Train station at the long-abandoned Knob Hill Farms site is a go again.

Well, here’s hoping anyway.

We all got excited a couple of years ago when Metrolinx declared it was building three new GO stations in Oshawa as part of an expansion of the train service into Clarington, with the main station to be located at the massive Knob Hills site off First Avenue.

This is the same First Avenue that lost Knob Hill Farms, its jobs and its cachet, in 2000. This is also the same First Avenue that watched as ... damn near nothing happened in the ensuing 13 years, unless you count a short-lived flea market as something significant. And yes, it’s the same First Avenue that lost Pittsburgh Glass Works in 2009 (a site occupied by a glass factory for nearly 100 years) and the entire Zellers Plaza membership list in the years that followed.

(Except for a furniture store where everything is on sale, all the time. Want a couch for $149? This is the place.)

Normally it’s pointless to cry over every neighbourhood that falls on hard times, but it’s called First Avenue because it’s the first important street you see as you come off the 401 at Simcoe, Oshawa’s main drag. With cars being built behind you and what looks like a ghost town in front of you, you’d forgive visitors if they thought they made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in Detroit.

So when Metrolinx said two years ago the Knob Hills site was the perfect spot for the central GO station, we said, “yes it is,” and “build it please.”

That’s what I said anyway.

And then, just as quickly, Metrolinx pulled out, citing unspecified environmental remediation costs and the inability of the crown agency to agree on a price with the land owner. “No longer interested,” was the statement from November, 2011.

Now the deal is back on the front burner, as Metrolinx has decided that coy negotiating tactics weren’t going to work. They’re going to expropriate, instead.

It’s win-win for everybody, including the land owner, so shed no tears, please.  The land is currently generating zero revenue and is costing plenty in land taxes. Expropriation offers market value. And it offers the residents of Oshawa a solution to a huge headache that has plagued this city for a baker’s dozen years.

A new GO station would mean jobs and it would completely revitalize a historic and important neighbourhood, and a highly visible one, at that.

And it’s certainly far more important than changing regimes at City Hall.

That’s just politics.

Now if expropriation would only work for the Genosha Hotel, we’d be getting somewhere.