There was a public meeting in Essex on Monday night that I think more people in Windsor-Essex should keep an eye on. It was about a vacant lot at 80 County Road 50 in Colchester, and what someone wants to build there.

Here’s the plan: a developer is looking to put up a three-storey mixed-use building. Commercial space on the ground floor, 19 apartments above, and a nine-unit motel as part of the mix. To make it work they need a few zoning changes, including approval for the motel, a small bump in the allowed building height, and some site-specific rules on parking and setbacks.

It sounds straightforward on paper but it wasn’t, and that’s the part worth talking about. The room was largely on board with the housing, but where it got interesting was with the motel. The site sits right next to the existing Grove Motel, and it’s that proximity is exactly what set people off.

A resident named Mike Piche stood up and said he likes the project, just not the motel piece. His reasoning stuck with me because it wasn’t ideological, it was local. He pointed out that Colchester is a seasonal place. In the winter there’s almost no tourist traffic. Weekends might bring a few more cars. So the idea of a second motel generating enough year-round revenue, right beside one that already exists, didn’t add up to him. When you live there, you know the rhythm of the place. That’s the kind of read you can’t get from a spreadsheet.

Councillor Brad Allard went further. He said flat out he can’t get behind it, that what the area needs is more housing, not another motel next to a motel. He even suggested it should be a two-storey apartment building instead of three.

Then Deputy Mayor Rob Shepley pushed back, and this is the part I keep chewing on. He said it isn’t council’s job to pick which businesses win and lose. Let the market decide whether a second motel can survive. If it can’t, that’s a problem the owner sorts out, and the space opens up for other commercial growth down the road. He used the word anti-competitive, and said it’s wrong for council to play that role.

So who’s right? I think both sides have a real point. That’s why this one matters.

The residents and Allard are speaking to something true. Housing is the need right now, and a motel that may sit half-empty for eight months a year isn’t doing much for a community that needs roofs over people’s heads. Shepley is also speaking to something true. Council steering the market by deciding what’s “viable” is a slippery thing to start doing. The developer is the one with money on the line. Usually that’s the person who has done the math the hardest.

This is the tension I see playing out across Windsor-Essex over and over right now. We need housing, badly. We also want growth that makes sense for the specific character of each town. Colchester is not Tecumseh and it’s not the core. What works in one place can fall flat in another. The question of who gets to decide what works, the council or the market, is going to keep coming up as more of these applications land.

No decision was made Monday. It heads back to a future council meeting for debate and a final call. I’ll be watching how this one lands, because the precedent matters more than this single lot. How council handles the motel question here tells you how they’re going to handle the next ten proposals that walk through the door.

If you’ve got a take on this, whether you’re in Colchester, Essex, or just someone who cares about how this region grows, I’d love to hear it. If you know someone who should be following local development decisions like this one, do me a favour and send it their way. The more of us watching these meetings, the better the outcomes tend to be.