Barrie city council has signed off on paying its neighbouring municipalities as much as $38,085,000 in compensation for land annexed from Springwater and Oro-Medonte townships.
The decision came Wednesday evening, Jan. 28, after a closed-door general committee session, with council ratifying the motion later the same night, according to BarrieToday.com.
The motion authorizes Mayor Alex Nuttall and clerk Wendy Cooke to execute compensation agreements with the Township of Springwater, the Township of Oro-Medonte and the County of Simcoe, consistent with the framework council endorsed on Oct. 1, 2025, and with agreements acceptable to chief administrative officer Michael Prowse.
The money covers the more than 4,100 acres that moved into Barrie under the Barrie-Oro-Medonte-Springwater Boundary Adjustment Act, 2025, which took effect Jan. 1, 2026. Springwater accounted for 3,004 of those acres and Oro-Medonte 1,129.
Under the October framework, Barrie agreed to pay $15,000 per developable acre — roughly $33 million split as $22,930,000 to Springwater and $10,155,000 to Oro-Medonte — plus $5 million to the County of Simcoe for regional economic development work. An $850,000 economic development payment to Springwater is folded into its total.
Nuttall said compensating the townships was always the plan, and he confirmed the funds will come from a city boundary reserve set up for that purpose.
"They were always going to be compensated for the land that came into Barrie," Nuttall said, according to BarrieToday.com. "There was always, for the last three years, going to be an agreement that was fair, that benefits the City of Barrie, to be able to get land to have jobs but also to ensure that it does provide some compensation to Springwater and Oro-Medonte."
The mayor estimated the annexed lands could eventually generate roughly $200 million a year in tax revenue for Barrie once the city extends services to them, and he framed the payments as compensation for tax revenue the other municipalities will forgo.
"The exchange is we're going to provide them the compensation the province has already approved that is in lieu of all the taxation they miss out on," he said, according to BarrieToday.com.
One complication remains: Oro-Medonte never signed on to the financial terms before the province introduced the boundary legislation. Prowse said in a statement that Barrie is still working with the Office of the Provincial Land and Development Facilitator on the required agreements, and negotiations are ongoing.
Prowse added that the city remains committed to carrying out the boundary act, which the province brought in citing Barrie's growth pressures.
The province has said Barrie's population grew nearly 13 per cent over two years and the city has no developable land left within its boundaries to accommodate future growth. Without expanding, the province has said, Barrie would exhaust its residential land supply by the 2030s and its employment land by the 2040s, putting future housing and job growth at risk given the long timelines involved in planning and building.
The province has also argued the boundary change strengthens Simcoe County as a whole, and affects only 2.3 per cent of the land in Springwater and 0.8 per cent in Oro-Medonte.
