Coun. Chris Holt defends vote against baseball diamond for kids with disabilities
Holt was the only counicllor to vote against the Miracle Field project
Windsor city councillor Chris Holt said staying popular isn't his goal.
His comment comes after being booed and criticized online for not supporting the Miracle Field project, which aims to build an accessible baseball diamond for children with disabilities.
Members of the Riverside Minor Baseball Association have been pushing for the city to partner with them on the project for years. The latest plan to develop the diamond at the old Riverside Arena site was supported by every Windsor councillor during Monday night's meeting — except Holt.
He explained on Windsor Morning that the only reason he voted against it was because the plan calls for it to be built right along Wyandotte Street, a corridor he believes should be reserved for other uses.
"If we'd just taken the proposal and flipped it 180 degrees so that Concord School, which the city now is going to be demolishing and developing as single family residential — if we flipped it and we put the Miracle Field towards the back of the property and we were allowed to develop Wyandotte Street proper with commercial, with mixed use, with the appropriate city development, I would've been all in favour," he explained.
The councillor said he would have been a hypocrite if he abandon the tenets of city building he espouses, just to fall in line on a feel-good vote.
"The easy thing to do was to go with the flow, was to ignore everything that I've learned about city building and just join in the feel good story of building an amenity in a neighbourhood," he said. "But unfortunately, I couldn't do that."