Highrise hijinks at city hall
By: Gordon Sinclair Jr. | Winnipeg Free Press
There’s a neighbourhood in North Kildonan with a problem that should concern every neighbourhood.
The problem is the size of two highrise apartment towers.
Actually, the problem is two highrise apartments towers.
Or at least their proposed construction adjacent to two other apartment buildings, which, I’m happy to report, have never been a problem.
A Vancouver developer wants to build the $50-million complex on land his company owns just south of the Chief Peguis Bridge. On land, I might add, that the city placed off limits to development more than 30 years ago.
The trusting people who inhabit the handful of houses in the area blissfully believed the city’s long-standing zoning pledge.
That promise being that they — and the nearby apartment-dwellers that the handful of homeowners have lived with in happy harmony — would always have their green space by the Red River.
Their own safe corner of the world, as it were.
But that world was destined to change when some of those same residents voted Sam Katz into office.
Twice.
They probably never thought the mayor’s pro-development bulldozer of a philosophy would invade their neighbourhood.
Gladys Bellamy was one of those blissfully believing — and blissfully ignorant — homeowners.
Not so much anymore, though.
“I can tell you I’ve lost faith in the democratic process,” she told city hall reporter Bartley Kives on Tuesday.
Gladys had just witnessed the bulldozer in action.
A week earlier, she and couple of hundred other neighbourhood residents thought they had stopped the beast in its big, ugly tracks.
They had turned out for an area community committee meeting where three city councillors sat listening to both sides of the issue. The meeting lasted from early evening until after midnight.
When it was over, the three councillors unanimously voted down the proposed project.
In fact, most of the residents were so convinced that they had won that they didn’t bother to show up on Tuesday when city council’s property and development committee met to vote on the same proposal.
There was one resident who wasn’t so sure, though. Graham Eagleton called Gladys Bellamy and asked if she would go down to city hall with him. He was afraid the slam-dunk of a decision was about to get slammed and dunked overboard.
Gladys agreed to go along to keep Graham company. But Gladys, the blissful believer, couldn’t believe that the highrise development would rise again.
How was she to know that Russ Wyatt, one of the councillors she recalled speaking so eloquently at the community committee meeting, had served notice that he wouldn’t be attending the second committee meeting because he was the city’s representative at the Association of Manitoba Municipalities convention.
As it turned out, Wyatt’s absence would be pivotal.
The remaining councillors — Scott Fielding, Mike O’Shaughnessy and North Kildonan Coun. Jeff Browaty — had another important issue on the agenda Tuesday night: the future of an historic Exchange District home that they voted to give a three-month stay of demolition.
By the time the committee members got around to the North Kildonan neighbourhood issue, Gladys was starting to nod off. It was the sound of that pro-development big machinery starting up again that woke her.
Gladys was shocked at how quickly and dismissively two of the three councillors rejected the community committee’s decision and voted to proceed with the highrise project. She recalled O’Shaughnessy calling the residents’ position “emotional.”
“He admitted from the start that he didn’t know much about the proposal,” Gladys wrote the next day. “Instead of reading the background of the development, understanding the existing zoning agreement, or even seeing a plan of the design, a few cursory questions were asked.”
The motion to build the highrise complex passed 2-1.
Afterward, Wyatt told me he would have been there if he thought the project would be given new life.
But with the pro-development likes of Fielding and O’Shaughnessy voting, Wyatt should have known better.
Of course, now Gladys knows better, too.
Ultimately, the proposal will be voted on by the full city council, which is controlled by the mayor.
But given that Phil Sheegl, the mayor’s hand-picked driver of development, has praised the project, it’s as good as built.
Anyway, in the aftermath of watching two city councillors taking a few minutes to make a decision that will change the nature of her neighbourhood forever, Gladys had a few questions.
“What is the point of holding a large community forum to debate major issues like constructing highrise towers in someone’s backyard if the findings of that committee are not taken into consideration?
“What kind of democratic process do we have in this city?”
That’s easy.
It’s a bulldozer democracy.
And you better get out of the way, because your neighbourhood could be next.
[email protected]nclair
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