“I believe the various available sites should be evaluated and council should decide the preferred location with public input,” Sprovieri said.

Others on Council seem resigned to the reality that the decision on the location of the university rests entirely with the province and Ryerson.

Coun. Grant Gibson who made up part of the faction on council in 2015 that defeated the Main Street LRT route north of Steeles said he agrees that a downtown location for a university would be preferable but “believes the experts at Ryerson and Sheridan would know better than Council what would work as a downtown campus.”

“At this point I am confident they will make a good decision.”

Generally, municipalities have control over their own planning, such as locating key pieces of infrastructure. Even though the province controls the funding on the university files, this decision marks the second time in just a few years that a major decision with long term economic implications for the city’s future is being dictated by outside forces.

Sprovieri and other councillors have argued that Mississauga had complete control over the LRT route. They also note Mississauga also had a say in deciding the location of the Sheridan Campus and UTM. Sprovieri agrees that the province and Ryerson should be involved but ultimately it should be the immediate stakeholders (residents, students and private sector partners) involved in the process on where the campus should be located.

Initially, the province had indicated that details on the university plan, including the location and the amount of provincial money allocated to capital expenditure, would be unveiled in December 2017, but that date has been pushed back by several weeks.

Meanwhile, local business and community leaders — disillusioned by the turmoil and lack of vision from city hall in recent years — have come forward with their own ideas for the new campus, which could accommodate between 1,000 to 5,000 students initially.

New Brampton, led by prominent business and community leaders, has invested a significant amount of money into drafting a vision for the downtown with the university facility and LRT line at the centre of a massive redevelopment effort in the heart of Canada’s ninth largest city.

On Tuesday Jan. 16, New Brampton members will host a town-hall meeting giving residents a chance to debate key issues affecting the municipality and to see the group’s vision for the city core first hand.

Rod Rice, the group’s chair, said it is crucial that the university be located on the Rosalea lands because it opens up a lot of possibilities for downtown development. His group envisions the GO lands used for a unique transportation hub that provides an opportunity for the city to become the gateway to southwestern Ontario. Investment in Rosalea Park and the Riverwalk could address two fundamental issues in one swoop. Construction of a campus on Rosalea could finally address flooding risks in the downtown while also establishing the city’s first university.

“It’s sort of like a puzzle. If you take a piece of the puzzle out and put it somewhere else everything else doesn’t quite fit well. We see this piece of the puzzle (the university being located on the Rosalea lands) because it ties ever so nicely into all of these other critical components.”

In 2014 city council adopted new planning policies and a bylaw that will allow close to 1,100 new residential units and up to 174,000 square metres of non-residential floor space for the city centre. The new strategy was approved by the province in April 2014 and included a comprehensive emergency plan to address potential flood risks from Etobicoke Creek.

