Plan for new Centretown park on McGarry property collapses
City doesn’t understand basics of the business world, Brian McGarry says
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN September 25, 2013
OTTAWA — Plans to turn a downtown parking lot into a city park are dead because the city won’t pay anything like what the land is worth, says its owner, funeral mogul Brian McGarry.
“I was astounded, quite frankly. It came by letter, through our lawyers. I guess dumbfounded would be the best way to put it,” McGarry said Tuesday. The city offered $4 million for the parking lot at McLeod and O’Connor streets, adjacent to the flagship Hulse, Playfair & McGarry funeral home, McGarry said. He said he has been offered $8 million for it by property developers and although he didn’t expect the city to pay quite that much, $4 million is simply insulting.
“The McGarrys didn’t mind taking something less than market value. We didn’t expect market value. But this is ridiculous,” he said.
The city’s unwillingness to tighten the gap speaks to a basic misunderstanding of how private business works, said McGarry, a former school-board trustee and regional councillor, and sometime candidate for the Conservatives.
“I’m not talking just this year or Jim Watson in particular, I’m talking councils several years back. They’ve lost a sense of corporate Ottawa. I just don’t think they’re treating corporate Ottawa very well. There seems to be an attitude — not from 100 per cent of councillors, but a lot of them — that when corporate Ottawa comes in, they’re always asking for more than they should get.”
The property has been the main chapel for Hulse, Playfair & McGarry for 88 years and McGarry loves it, but he thinks more and more that it’s time to move, as the value of the property goes up and the convenience of holding funerals in the middle of downtown goes down.
“They’re cutting the parking back all the time. The bulldozers are out on Gladstone right now,” McGarry said, reconstructing the crumbling street but also reducing the number of parking spots on the street.
He has his eye on another downtown spot that could be a new headquarters, more accessible and yet cheaper. He was willing to sell the whole McGarry property to the city if that deal would have worked better, he said.
The funeral home, which is a heritage building, could have been turned into a community centre or a daycare. A park that at least covered the existing parking lot might have gone some way to replacing the land the nearby Museum of Nature now intends to take up with a new parking lot of its own.
“We saw it as a bit of a donation, really,” McGarry said.
The idea of selling the land to the city arose after a development plan with builder Charlesfort Developments fell through last year. The company envisioned a condominium on stilts, with a publicly accessible garden below. But it would have had to have been tall, much taller than the city’s plan for the neighbourhood allows.
The latest version of the plan identifies McGarry’s property as a site for a landmark building, potentially suited for the tallest building in the city, but only if it has a very major public amenity or a big new home for a cultural institution at ground level. A small park or garden wouldn’t cut it: it would have to be something more like the headquarters of the Toronto International Film Festival, which is at the base of a 46-storey luxury condo tower.
The Citizen couldn’t reach Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes to talk about the collapse of the McGarry proposal; when the idea first came up last November, she said it would be “very difficult, but possible” to pull off.
Given the city’s budget for parks, even $4 million is a lot of money. Parkland is built into new suburban developments, but it’s hard to retrofit into long established neighbourhoods, so the city charges builders of things like condominiums a fee that’s supposed to go to either buying new parkland or total renovations to existing parks to make them suitable for new residents. It’s divided up ward by ward, though, and a recent reckoning of the various funds had $1 million in the one for Somerset ward, which includes the McGarry property. The ward that had the most unspent money, Kitchissippi, had $2 million. McGarry offered to let the city spread payments out over many years, he said, knowing how little money is available.
McGarry said his property isn’t actively for sale, though he’s been getting offers for it for 10 years. Its value just goes up, so although he’s turning 70 and wants to see something sorted out, McGarry’s not in a rush.
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People often get emotional and ignore logic when it comes to dealing with the homeless and the poor. Like with the whole kerfluffle over safe injection sites. It is proven without dispute that safe injection sites are a really good thing, dramatically reducing deaths and significantly improving the rehabiliation rate for drug addicts, but people still get all upset at them. I really wish the government would step out of these issues and let the psychologists & social workers handle them.
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