Pair of parking spots paralyses planning committee
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN December 10, 2013 7:01 PM
OTTAWA — Two parking spaces in Centretown. Only two. Whether Ottawa needs them or not, they took up more of city council’s planning committee time than almost anything else this year.
While councillors and dozens of lawyers, urban planners and residents waited to have their say on everything from rezonings up and down King Edward Avenue to how we’ll move thousands of people into the areas around new light-rail stations, on Tuesday the planning committee spent almost a whole morning on two parking spaces.
They are special parking spaces. They’re the last two parking spaces a developer will be able to buy his way out of providing under a program city council killed last summer. The builder, Jordan Tanis, is converting a house at 186 James St., which has long-since been converted into three large apartments, into 10 small ones. Under a city rule that says you need at least one parking space for every two units, that means five parking spots, but there’s only room on the property for three.
“Lot size is not considered a legitimate site constraint,” nearby resident Robert Brando told the committee. The fact Tannis wants to build something that can’t fit on his lot isn’t anybody’s problem but his, Brando argued.
However: The law that sets the number of parking spots a development needs counts units, not bedrooms. Tanis could build exactly the same thing — adding on to the existing house, extending the porch, adding numerous bedrooms — but if it were divided into six apartments instead of 10, with more bedrooms in each, he wouldn’t have to deal with the parking.
Coun. Peter Hume, who chairs the planning committee, teased out of Brando that that would be OK. You’d be fine with a six-unit building? Hume asked him.
“Totally,” Brando replied.
But that’s not what Tannis wants to do, said his architect Robert Martin, who’s made a growing specialty out of working on house conversions such as this (which the city has temporarily banned in areas close to Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, though not in Centretown).
This plan is meant to “represent the very best kind of intensification,” Martin said. It’s delicately designed, within all the zoning rules but one, using materials like red brick that match its neighbours. Nobody going by should even notice it when it’s done.
Tannis could build the same thing with six units instead of 10, Martin said, but he wants comfortable, smallish apartments mostly for quiet single people, not student housing or apartments shared by a lot of roommates.
That left the committee at something of a loss, trying to figure out what to do with a dozen or more furious residents who’ve formed a group called the Friends of James and Bay, sinking hundreds of hours into fighting a development that only barely needs the rules bent, in the slightest of ways.
They had numerous complaints about how Tannis’s project has ground through the city’s planning bureaucracy, including that it has changed three or four times in six months with only quiet updates to a file on the city’s website. The city’s parking department doesn’t like the idea of two cars being forced into long-term parking on a public street. And Coun. Diane Holmes is on their side.
They surveyed their neighbours, resident Maria Luisa Marti told the committee. “Most people said things like, ‘I am mad as hell’,” she said. Nobody trusts politicians, Holmes excepted. They feel sidelined.
The planning committee, in the end, signed off on the proposal, with the proviso that Tannis’s current proposal, exactly as it stands right now, is what gets the parking exemption — he doesn’t get to change it again even slightly without getting approval. And the $8,600 fee he’ll have to pay will go into a fund to improve nearby McNabb Park, not into a citywide parking fund that’s rarely tapped for anything.
City council gets the final say at a meeting Jan. 22.
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