Unity of the community is what drives Councillor Rosa to champion local business

January 13, 2022 · 0 Comments

By Rob Paul

Since being elected as a Bolton’s area Councillor in 2018, Tony Rosa has been on a crusade to help reinvigorate local business. He has a passion for showcasing everything Bolton has to offer.

Rosa has lived in Bolton for over 20 years while raising his family here and working as the head of guidance and student services at St. Michael’s Catholic Secondary School.

Initially his strong sense of the community and the needs of those in it motivated Rosa to run for Council to try and make a tangible difference in Bolton.

“Living and working in the community and being a guidance counsellor, I got to know a lot of students and families which allowed me to understand a lot of the local issues,” he said. “I felt that I could make a positive contribution to the larger Town community in addition to the school community. I’ve been here since 1998 and I have a very good idea of the community. Even prior to that as a student working my way through school I worked at Cedar Glen—now the YMCA—so I even knew the Town quite well prior to moving here. I’d spend my summers working here in summer programs and have always been very familiar with Caledon. Having raised a family and two children while living here with my extended family also living here and serving the school community while working here, we have a lot of connection to the community. I’ve always wanted to help move it forward.”

Rosa’s connections throughout the community have made him a strong advocate for change and have helped him recognize what needs to be improved and focused on to help Bolton reach its potential.

“You need to have connections so that you have a better understanding of what the community is looking for and what the community needs for what you plan on championing,” he said. “You need to have a plan in order to identify what the requirements are and what the needs are, and it has to be an achievable and attainable plan so that you can actually champion some of those critical issues.”

In his first term on Cuncil, one of Rosa’s top accomplishments was to help the Caledon Chamber of Commerce become a key player in the community and to strengthen its ties to the Town in order to help business thrive. This, in turn, led him to developing the Love Local Campaign as a champion of small local businesses in Bolton.

“First, reestablishing a relationship between the Town and the Caledon Chamber of Commerce,” he said. “I brought forward a motion that reestablished the relationship and we got the Chamber of Commerce back operating with a new board and direction. I think during the pandemic, and especially for post-pandemic recovery, we need to have a strong Chamber and a good working relationship with it in order to support the businesses in our community.

“I think for too many years there wasn’t a strong relationship between the Town and Chamber and now we see a very active Chamber reinstated. That’s one of my biggest accomplishments in addition to creating the Love Local Caledon campaign and supporting local businesses that have been affected. I’d always had concerns about businesses in Bolton and protecting their longevity and now with us facing a major crisis with the global pandemic, I felt it was very important to profile businesses to help people understand what’s available in their own backyards. One of the biggest pieces of feedback that I got was that a lot of people didn’t even know that these businesses existed and that really spoke volumes to me about the importance of promoting local businesses. We wanted to try and have people understand what’s available to them, especially when we were in lockdown and could only access our local community.”

Going forward, Rosa doesn’t plan to stop with the Love Local Campaign. Instead, he’s hoping to expand it by working with the Chamber to show outside businesses why they should come to Bolton.

“It’s extremely important because we’re putting a lot of effort into the revitalization of the core; we’re trying to get a lot of empty units filled,” he said. “Profiling businesses and finding ways to attract people to our community will give people reason to stay in our community. I think people are looking for opportunities to stay close to home these days, so we have to continue to profile businesses. It’s not just for the pandemic; in partnership with the Chamber of Commerce, we hope to continue to do this as part of a long-term strategy because this was something I worried about even before the pandemic.

“During the pandemic we’ve seen it’s a proven initiative that’s working so we need to continue on that path and find more unique out-of-the-box ways of ensuring people know what’s available to them in the community. The focus right now, if we’re going to revitalize, is that we’ve got to give people a reason to come here and more importantly, find ways to support them so that they stay here. We’ve had more business openings in the downtown core of Bolton during the pandemic than we’ve had in the last 10 years. Clearly, we’re moving in the right direction when it comes to attracting businesses. One of the things I’ve learned during this term on council is that we need more employment opportunities in Caledon, and we need to attract businesses to the community so that people have opportunities to go to work in their communities. That’s going to be a strategy we take on with the Chamber as well.”

The overall goal for Rosa with the campaign, especially with the economic impact of the pandemic, is to help economic recovery by keeping people working and shopping in the community in order to motivate residents to spend in Caledon rather than in an outside community.

“When people stay in their community and engage in their community, they’re going to shop here and eat here. That’s going to help me take on my next challenge which is to build unity across this huge municipality. This is a massive municipality in terms of landmass and that’s why the Unity and Community Bandwagon Tour we did was about showcasing everything Caledon has to help unify the municipality rather than divide it into many small hamlets and villages. We want to bring people together and show them everything that’s available across Caledon.”

Along with the continued profiling of businesses, Rosa has pivoted the Love Local Caledon campaign to put more emphasis on organizations in the community that offer different types of programming to residents.

In 2022, he’d also like to make transit more accessible to help unite the community.

“We did a great job profiling businesses but now we want to profile more local community organizations to expand community engagement,” he said. “People haven’t been able to participate in a lot of the activities and extracurriculars available to them (due to the pandemic), whether it be sports or arts or culture. So, now we’re profiling local organizations and their programs because I think it’s very important to reengage people in the community to get them out and having them feel more comfortable with social interaction. We just profiled the new rugby team in Caledon and did a video and it got a great response, so I think that’s a key strategy in 2022: providing residents with information on what’s available to them when it comes to recreation and leisure in their community. I’d also like to re-examine the Bolton bus line and to take a look at how effective it has been,” he said. “My goal is to move that line north of King Road because right now it only services up to Queen Street and King. I’m hoping to move it into the North Hill so that there will be stops at the Caledon Centre, at the Rotary, and at the high schools. There’s a huge ridership we’re missing out on by not moving the line north of King Road so I’m really pushing for it.”

One of the most important pieces of being a Councillor in Rosa’s eyes is working with the rest of Council to support different initiatives that matter to their areas to help get the most important issues taken care of in his.

“You have to find ways of working with the rest of Council in order to have a fair share on your priorities,” he said. “For example, getting unanimous support from Council to support the expansion of the Caledon Seniors Centre in Bolton was a massive goal. We’re talking about seniors who have been our taxpayers the longest and they really needed better facilities and expanded programming. You need to get that support from the rest of council so you have to identify how you can support one another to champion needs in the community. I’m very pleased Council supported that because it was a major goal for me. Another major goal was road improvements and more importantly road safety, and that has to be shared as well across the municipality. My top priority was to make sure Columbia Way was safer because we have buses on that road, and it has that curve so one of the first goals upon my election was to bring that road up to safety standards—we had full Council support on getting that repaired.”

Nothing is more important to Rosa than ensuring he is listening to those in the community, and he points to a prime example as to why it’s so important to search for feedback from residents.

“I’m constantly getting feedback and suggestions,” he said. “One of the most important things was the Old Fire Hall. We had a lot of discussions about it, and I heard a lot of feedback that people didn’t want it to be sold and wanted it to remain in the hands of the public. Turning that into a future innovative community hub with a variety of different arts, culture, and technological activities, was a huge win for the community. People didn’t want it sold for another condo to go up and now it creates an anchor for downtown Bolton and gives people a reason to go down there and access those spaces. Cooperative workspaces, innovation centres, maker spaces, creative spaces, all of that will provide programming for people to go down to the core and have options that they currently don’t have. We’re checking off a box there. Fulfilling that need is a major part of the revitalization and it provides people who are desperate for an alternative workspace now that they’re working from home. This will be a great place for people to gather and use the facility.”