County of Brant Council was introduced to a new growth tracking tool during its regular Council meeting on Tuesday, September 9, 2025.
According to a report, submitted by Brandon Kortleve, Manager of Policy Planning, and Lilly Brown, a Policy Planning Student, County staff, in collaboration with Watson and Associates Ltd., have developed a new, interactive online tool that tracks growth.
The intent of the tool is to help track development activity, test future growth scenarios, monitor infrastructure servicing capacity and improve transparency around key growth trends within the County.
“More than a technical tool, the model tells the story of growth in the County of Brant. It brings both planning data and the Official Plan policy objectives together to provide analysis, illustrate trends, and identify where growth patterns fall short or exceed targets,” read the report. “In doing so, the model tracks past and current development trends, how development activity aligns with the County’s objectives, and provides opportunities to explore scenarios for future growth. …The model will help track whether the County is meeting the housing, employment, infrastructure and servicing needs of the community, and provides the opportunity for staff to respond with policy or directional changes, when needed.”
In short, the model helps to communicate what kind of data is being analyzed behind the scenes when Council and staff are making decisions around growth.
“It’s for consistency,” said Kortleve. “We need a central view of growth in the municipality. …It helps with informed decision making, with directions and in the end, it benefits staff, it benefits Council, the residents, and anyone who’s investing or developing in the County of Brant.”
The tool will help staff track non-residential growth by comparing the employment forecast to actual job growth, and give staff a clear picture of current growth and future trends across the County by showing yearly residential growth (such as population numbers and housing units),
Other key components of the online tool also include:
- Servicing tracker
Helps compare how much water and wastewater service is currently available, and how much will be needed in the future based on the growth forecast, and will show when infrastructure upgrades are needed.
- Growth navigator
Looks at how population and housing numbers change over time, and provides staff with the ability to analyze the numbers by geography, time frame, and type of data (like population).
The tool also allows staff to compare those actual or projected values against future forecast estimates, and will flag if the County is growing beyond what’s expected.
- Scenario builder
Allows staff to determine the impacts of growth levels on various geographic levels (County-wide or specific settlements) and gives them the opportunity to create scenarios and see what the impact of an influx of housing may have on servicing needs.
“It allows us to put in hypothetical situations for growth, and one of the most relevant ways that we’ll use this is for build-out opportunities,” explained Kortleve. “…We’d be able to plug the information in for the build-out of a settlement, and it would help inform, for example, when we would need to see servicing upgrades, when certain demand would happen, and help us to decide on a phase or stage for the growth to happen over time.”
- Application tracker
Connects growth projections with actual development activity by tracking development applications through the approvals process, and linking forecasted growth to the real housing pipeline.
“What this does is it plugs in all of our development application data, and it tells us how many units are planned – hypothetically, and how many permits have been issued,” explained Kortleve.
Following Kortleve’s presentation and demonstration, councillors expressed that they were in support of the tool, and took the opportunity to ask various questions.
Howes mentioned that in the report it says that staff have identified that the County has approved 8,279 units that remain unbuilt, and that of those units, 54 per cent are low-density, 28 per cent are medium-density, and 18 per cent are high-density.
He then asked when it would be the right time to discuss strategies around influencing developers to build the type of housing that is needed, rather than what is most profitable.
Kortleve said that the housing market has developers already shifting towards purpose-built rentals over the long-term, but that such conversations are in the works and will continue to happen.
Other councillors spoke about how the growth can’t necessarily be stopped but slowed and controlled, how the County can make the growth work in its favour, how such information can be communicated to the public, and how often the tool’s data will be updated. All factors which will continue to be ironed out along the way.
Councillor David Miller said that while the tool will be helpful for staff, developers, councillors and the public, he wondered if the school boards could also get access to the information.
“I think one of the big users of this [tool] could be the school boards,” he said. “…The number of new schools they’re putting in doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the growth. You’ll often get a brand new school, and then two years after it’s up, they’ve got ten portables out back. You mentioned that you might have a training session for internal staff and planners, are they any thoughts of inviting the school board planners? Because I could see them really getting a lot of good use out of this.”
Kortleve said that a lot of the school board planning is also done through Watson and Associates, and so that was something staff could look into.
Later, Councillor Robert Chambers asked if they could use the data and the online tool when it came down to the County defending its decisions if brought to the Ontario Land Tribunal.
“Can it be used to influence the developers when they make their applications for growth? and can it be used in defending Council positions at the OLT, where we’re taken by developers who have made the applications that are responsible for the growth?” he asked.
Kortleve said that the short answer was yes.
“What it will do is help with data driven decision-making,” said Kortleve. “So yes, we’ll have the data to back up the decision-making.”
As far as next steps for the tool, training to use the online model will be rolled out to staff in the coming weeks. Staff and Council will have access to the tool through a detailed portal, and eventually, the public will also have access to a version of the data as well.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
