This post is the fourteenth in a series in which we reached out to municipal candidates to ask their heritage platform. Responses will be posted in the order received.
Saurabh Katara was the fourteenth candidate to respond. He is running for Council in the Town of Amherstburg.
Thank you for reaching out and for the opportunity to share my views on heritage conservation and adaptive reuse in Amherstburg.
Our history is one of Amherstburg’s greatest strengths — it’s part of what makes this town feel like itself. I want to protect what’s genuinely significant. But preservation also has to be practical and financially sustainable. Protecting a heritage asset without a viable long-term plan doesn’t serve taxpayers, the community, or ultimately the building itself.
Amherstburg took a real step in that direction in 2025, when Council adopted the town’s first Heritage Conservation District by-law, after decades of advocacy finally paying off. Belle Vue is the next test of that same commitment — and a harder one, because it isn’t about guiding character across a district. It’s about rescuing one specific building.
Here’s what that building has been through. The Town bought it in 2016 for roughly $1.1 million, with restoration estimated at the time around $2.5 million. The Belle Vue Conservancy and its donors raised hundreds of thousands of dollars toward its future, and a $100,000 federal grant helped restore the roof in 2018 — the same roof a storm tore open again this past July. The Town applied for five heritage grants and secured two. In 2024, Council pursued a restoration partnership with Amico/Loop; that proposal ultimately did not move forward, leaving Belle Vue’s long-term future unresolved. A decade, a study, an expression-of-interest process, and a redevelopment negotiation — and Belle Vue still doesn’t have a plan that held.
That history tells me something: goodwill and effort haven’t been the problem here. What’s been missing is a structure that actually survives contact with real costs.
Amherstburg shouldn’t leave Belle Vue to deteriorate indefinitely, and I don’t believe local taxpayers should carry an open-ended restoration or operating burden with no plan behind it. But I also don’t think the answer is to just sell it and move on. The Belle Vue Conservancy and its donors have put real time and money into this building. Any path forward has to treat that, and the site’s public value, as something to build on — not something to negotiate away for convenience.
I’d stay genuinely open to private investment, a partnership, grant-supported restoration, or a sale to a qualified owner. But before I’d support any of it, I’d want the long-term use, the financing, the heritage protections, accessibility, and appropriate public access all actually worked out — not assumed. I won’t tell you today which of those is the right mechanism, because I don’t think that call can honestly be made from outside Council with half the information. What I can tell you is what I’d do first: review the full financial and structural picture early in the term, sit down directly with the Belle Vue Conservancy, its donors, and groups like the ACO before any direction gets set, and tell residents plainly how and why a decision was reached.
Belle Vue deserves a Council that treats it as a priority from day one — not a file that gets picked up again every few years and set back down.
To follow the candidate’s campaign, visit his Facebook Page
Featured picture is from the candidate’s Linkedin Page
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