BRIDGETOWN, N.S. - Gordonstoun, an international not-for-profit boarding school is coming to Annapolis County thanks to a lot of people, but in the end, council took the initiative in an outside-the-box sort of way.
There will be 600 students annually from around the world and it compliments the county’s work with cities in China bringing students to the area.
Warden Timothy Habinski has been working on both those fronts as the face of council in both China and Scotland.
“I’m elated. All the way along our philosophy as a council, certainly my own philosophy, is that you cannot wait for good things to be brought to you,” said Habinski in an interview. “You need to go out into the world, try to develop relationships, find best practices, find good ideas and bring them back.”
Working with businessman David Wang, the county has brought numerous students to local schools, and most recently a delegation of Chinese businesspeople visited the area with an interest in such products as fish and cider.
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“Municipalities need to actively be seeking the good things their communities need in order to thrive and prosper. This is one of the things where we did that,” he said in reference to Gordonstoun Nova Scotia, the $62-Million project of New Brunswick developer Edward Farren. “I think what we found is a remarkably good fit for Annapolis County. I think it’s going to make a profound difference to the county for decades.”
Economic Driver
Habinski has full confidence in Gordonstoun Nova Scotia as an economic driver.
“It’s just about as good as you could find in a project of this scale,” he said. “Municipalities of course are always looking for something and the sorts of things they often wind up with are things like call centres which are often there on a very temporary basis, they provide low-paying jobs, and they disappear, and they leave a hole -- and they were often provided with infrastructure at the outset.”
He said schools like Gordonstoun, which has been in existence in northern Scotland for 84 years, have really strong business cases.
“They tend to measure their life expectancy in decades and centuries rather than in individual years,” he said. “They’re good-paying jobs with a business that’s stable, that is going to have an extremely light footprint on the environment, that plans to be active within the community and integrated into the community.”
The warden said for all those reasons it’s an ideal project.
“It will be bringing in directly nearly 100 jobs, and then indirectly the multiplier is very significant for the local businesses that will grow or be created in order to meet some of the needs of Gordonstoun,” he said. “And they are absolutely committed to local shopping right across the board. So I think we’re going to see an impact on our local farmers. We’re going to see an impact on our local developers because there’s going to be a real need for building housing as well adjacent to it and ancillary to the facility.”
Housing
Local housing could also be positively affected by Gordonstoun.
“What we have been told, while we were in Scotland, was that quite a number of the parents of students, particularly students from the Middle East and from Asia, liked to get a residence close to the school for the duration of their child’s attendance,” Habinski said. “They said that’s a very common thing, so we anticipate it will be good for housing in the area. We anticipate it’s going to be creating jobs in construction.”
The warden said for a town the size of Bridgetown, such a school in the area would have a major impact.
“It has a population of just under a thousand people and probably a workforce of somewhere right around 375,” he said. “I think it’s not unreasonable to anticipate that Gordonstoun will directly and indirectly create about 225 very good jobs right in the region. Just think what kind of an impact that would have on the economy the size of Bridgetown.”
As for the social economy, Habinski sees only positive things.
“One of the things that I anticipate seeing here -- because I certainly saw it in Elgin near the original Gordonstoun Scotland -- because the students of Gordonstoun are so active in volunteerism, the students at the local public schools have elevated their own volunteerism. It tends to cause a resurgence of that. To me that’s social capital. That’s absolutely one of the tangible intangible benefits like this.”
Net Zero
“It’s such a good fit for us. This doesn’t involve resource extraction. This doesn’t involve manufacturing. The facility itself is planned to be a net-zero building. This is so exciting,” Habinski said. “This would be the first completely net-zero school campus in Canada. It’s better than LEED Platinum. That means it has zero negative impact on the environment.”
The Warden believes the school buildings will be a showcase.
“That’s going to be a reason for people around the world to look for Annapolis County – just for the facility itself because it’s going to be innovative,” he said. “The net-zero building is a higher standard than all the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards.”
He said Gordonstoun Nova Scotia would need very stringent requirements for energy efficiency, for the sorts of components that go into the actual structure itself.
“When you build a normal school you have a period of off-gassing because there’s toxic gasses in the materials that have to be removed from the building before you actually open it,” he explained. “A Net-zero building doesn’t use that sort of material. It uses materials that don’t damage the environment to extract, built in such a way that it doesn’t damage the environment when it’s built.”
He said they would produce their own energy, their waste management systems will be extremely efficient, and it would be highly insulated.
“A net-zero build isn’t much more expensive than a conventional build,” he said. “Net-zero buildings are really the best in the world. It’s the aspiration for how all construction should eventually go.”
Business Case
Asked about the county’s confidence in Gordonstoun, Habinski was unequivocal.
“It’s a question that will arise with any project, and it comes down to how thoroughly the municipality vets the business case for a project that it considers,” he said. “And in this case the business case is astonishingly strong. If we thought, and by ‘we’ I mean the whole team -- the council and the people we’ve brought to regard this – if we thought the business case wasn’t strong we wouldn’t want to absorb the liability. It’s an extremely strong business case.”
The benefits will be plentiful, he said.
“Increased economic activity within the county will be good for county tax coffers as well,” he said. “We’re talking about a lot of development, filling up the homes that are currently vacant, probably a significant amount of new development as well. All that stuff has an impact on property tax revenue and that’s a good thing.”
