Prince Edward County is often described as a tourist haven of wineries, beaches, bachelorette parties and quaint Main Streets.

But it is its built and cultural heritage that supports tourism. That heritage needs to be leveraged through social entrepreneurship and economic development.

Heritage offers a tangible record of how people lived, built, worked, gathered, and endured in the County over time. It’s also about the intangible stories, symbols, and legacies that define our landscapes and communities, which are shaped by both Indigenous and Settler histories.

 If we’re serious about planning for our future, the County’s rich heritage needs to be embedded much more strategically within our local economy in a way that goes beyond insufficient tax incentives.

Strategic, future-looking decisions are needed to protect County heritage.

This is why the Heritage Master Plan, which comes to Council on February 18th, matters. Not because it tells us what heritage is, but because it tells us what heritage does.

One perfect example of strategic planning just unfolded around the Wellington Town Hall, a County-owned heritage building that needs a refurbishment of at least $650,000.

Last December, Council declined a proposal from Christina Zeidler and Sarah Bobas to transform the Main Street heritage building into a community hub.

Both Zeidler and Bobas bring gold-standard experience building cultural infrastructure and directing arts programming. Ms. Bobas opened the Everything Variety & Pop-Up in Wellington a couple of years ago — now a year-round community mainstay. Zeidler led the initial transformation of Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel in 2003, acting as both developer and entrepreneur to renovate and revitalize the historic Victorian building using a community-based approach. Over time, the Gladstone has become a centrepiece of its neighbourhood’s transformation into a cultural hub.

Luckily, Council reversed course on its decision to decline this proposal. It was approved in January, and Zeidler and Bobas are now working for the County.

But that initial no-vote was worrying.

The Wellington Town Hall project is a model of stewardship, adaptive reuse, streetscape value, public benefit, and good governance. Further, it promises to link the County’s heritage to economic development.

Our 2021 Official Plan is full of directions related to heritage conservation. It requires the County to identify and conserve cultural heritage resources and to ensure that all new development, where possible, protects heritage through adaptive reuse while enhancing its context. 

Putting such directives into practice is never easy.

An important recommendation of the new Master Plan is to include Cultural Heritage Landscapes, not just buildings, in the Official Plan. Identifying the Millennium Trail as a cultural landscape, for example, will help preserve its unique character.

The Heritage Master Plan can guide future planning at Base31 and Warings Creek and certainly support improvements to public spaces like Delhi Park, a prime example of a cultural heritage landscape. Delhi Park’s potential depends as much on its earned pride of place in Picton as on design decisions influenced by culture, education, climate resilience, and geography. With a solid Heritage Plan as its foundation, Delhi Park has the potential to become a nationally recognized public landscape that defines an important part of the County’s urban identity. 

While the Master Plan explicitly supports aligning conservation with economic goals, linking heritage to economic development is perhaps its weakest component. It cites “tourism partnerships” as a primary tool for supporting heritage assets but offers no practical examples or direction.

The County doesn’t collect nearly as steep a tax on accommodations as many towns in New England, but we do collect a Municipal Accommodation Tax (MAT) of 4% on short-term rentals, including hotels. About half of that revenue is allocated to our Destination Management Organizations Visit the County and StayPEC, which are tasked with both tourism promotion and placemaking — developing the assets that make the County a unique place to visit.

Meanwhile, the municipality is sitting on roughly $1 million in MAT revenue, the other half of those MAT funds. In the absence of a clear, consistent policy on heritage, this money is spent on filling potholes rather than enhancing funding for our seven museums, each of which showcases essential local narrative and living history. The aircraft-focused museum at Base31 is a clear reminder of how private developers seized on the opportunity to link heritage with tourism.

 New England towns like Nantucket and Newport are celebrated heritage destinations with a strong culture of design governance and conservation. They boast townscapes that feel coherent rather than patched together by one-off, incremental mediocrity.

Tourism can help fund such placemaking and placekeeping. There are many examples in Ontario where accommodation taxes support heritage preservation and cultural initiatives. Niagara-on-the-Lake spent $500,000 for a museum expansion. Gravenhurst, Brockville and Stratford have all invested in heritage and culture festivals. Woolwich used its funds to support its heritage district and develop cultural tourism circuits.

 The Heritage Plan is a call for better design governance. Its first recommendation is to hire a Heritage Planner or retain qualified professionals to identify, evaluate, and guide adaptive reuse and conservation of the County’s built and cultural heritage.

 The County might also consider creating a “Design Review Panel” that would deliver even greater value to the entire County.

Although not included in the Heritage Plan’s recommendations, a Design Review Panel would support both heritage (about 16 heritage permits are issued annually) and non-heritage-related development that significantly impacts the public realm. It could support Council, municipal staff and the BACHAC by impartially evaluating development proposals through the lens of cultural and built heritage, context, massing, streetscape, materials, and the public realm. DRPs are especially useful for depoliticizing planning applications by offering impartial expertise from professionals paid a modest honorarium (usually covering travel costs and a modest per diem). In addition to efficiently resolving heritage issues as they arise, panelists serve as mediators between developers and the County. 

Heritage is not anti-development. Heritage is anti-generic development. Let’s hope the Heritage Master Plan is not just a first step, but a harbinger for better things to come.