Residents concerned about sales office

The following letter, to the mayor and council, was submitted to the Sentinel.
My wife and I received a notice in the mail that a report prepared by the planning division to the Committee of the Whole with respect to the above application is scheduled for the Sept. 21 council meeting.
You will recall that if approved, the application will allow a developer to establish a sales/model office in an existing house on the corner of Carmichael Cres. and Keele St. (in a residential area) to promote the sales of a new housing development further east towards Dufferin St. In other words, the sales/model office would be outside the boundaries of the new development.
I understand that the report is not available to the public until Sept. 17. Residents (including council) will not know before then whether the planning division is recommending the application be approved by council. Any written comments from residents on the report are due on the 21st by noon. This is less than 4 days after the report is released, which is not a lot of time to absorb a report that the planning division took 10 months to prepare. (I trust the pandemic was the reason the report took this long to prepare.)
Mayor, you will recall that the residents in the Carmichael/DiNardo Court and surrounding area voiced their strong opposition to this application last October when the application was first heard by council. I assure you that the residents continue to be strongly opposed to the application.
The proposal is simply inappropriate and is not fair for the residents in the area. It also sets a bad precedent for future development in King Township by allowing developers to change the rules.
The developer is essentially attempting to insert a commercial activity in a residential area that is sure to create significant traffic congestion. This should be enough reason to reject the application. Plus, the same developer managed to sell all the new homes it built on Carmichael over a 3-4-year period without a sales/model home – they can surely do so again from their decor centre for its new development.
As important, if the developer wanted a sales/model home at this location, it should have been in the original plans for the homes it built on Carmichael. That way residents who moved into the new homes would have known there was going to be a sales/model home in the area. Simply put, the developer is attempting to get around the rules/conditions set out or in place when they built the new homes on Carmichael. These rules/conditions were in part the result of discussions and negotiations with the then existing area residents on Carmichael and DiNardo who wanted to ensure the new homes were in keeping with the rest of the subdivision – a requirement to which each of us who previously built our home had to adhere.
While we do not know whether the planning division will recommend approval, it remains a mystery to me how such an application in these circumstances could be given serious consideration, let alone be approved, by council.
Hopefully, the planning division will not support the application. If it does, I trust common sense will prevail among council members and they will support residents by voting to reject the application.
There is very little time between now and the 21st. I am concerned that residents these days are rightly more preoccupied with effect the pandemic is having on their day-to-day lives, including whether to send their children back to school, and may not be focused on this development.
Hence, I am ccing all members of council and also plan to forward this email to local media outlets to spread word about the soon to be released report and vote by council.

Nick Pantaleo
DiNardo Court
King City