Planning committee turns down Parkdale tower, east-side townhouse complex
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN June 25, 2013 7:58 PM
OTTAWA — City council’s planning committee showed rare backbone Tuesday, rejecting not one but two development proposals widely unpopular among their immediate neighbours.
The higher-profile one, an 18-storey building called Attika proposed for a site next to the Parkdale Market by developer Tega Homes, has roiled Hintonburg and Wellington West since it was first presented as a 36-storey tower in 2010. The planning committee turned it down on a vote of 6-2, fully expecting that fight to end up before the Ontario Municipal Board, which can overrule city councils’ urban-planning decisions.
“We will be off to council and tribunals beyond,” observed the committee’s chairman, Coun. Peter Hume, as he joined the majority in turning down the city’s own planners’ advice to approve the 18-storey version.
The — is that the OMB will actually order a shorter building, something like 12 storeys, if Tega challenges the decision. A community-design plan for the area, meant to set the city’s vision for a long strip close to Wellington Street west of downtown, says just eight storeys would be about right for the property, an L-shaped piece of land that wraps around the Carleton Tavern.
The proposal’s tortured history makes it hard to determine just what rules are supposed to apply. For one thing, the application for a 36-storey building arrived at City Hall before the community-design plan was approved, so technically that vision doesn’t apply. But the city nevertheless applied some version of its standards in handling Tega’s proposal.
The version the city’s planners decided is acceptable has the same density as the eight-storey building the plan talks about, it’s just rearranged into a taller, prettier building, explained planning approvals manager John Smit.
“It’s really to start moving toward the sculpting of the mass that’s allowable on the site,” he said.
The argument is often used to justify taller building: the taller version would hold the same number of people, so its impact on the neighbourhood would be exactly the same, but a taller and slimmer building is more elegant. In this case, an 18-storey tower would be on a back corner of Tega’s property but a lower podium would be closer to the Parkdale Market and the tavern, leaving more chances for redevelopment there.
We’re not buying it, declared Jeff Leiper, the president of the Hintonburg Community Association. “For the sake of consistency and certainty ... we should stick with the plans that we create,” he said.
Several councillors who have community design plans underway or in force in their own wards, agreed. Hume, who’d previously refused to negotiate with Tega in pursuit of a shorter building, acknowledged he’d made a mistake. “I think this is a lesson for us all. I’ve certainly learned a valuable lesson,” he said.
It’s an expensive one. The city’s lawyer Tim Marc, who wrote a legal opinion saying he could probably defend a roughly 12-storey building, won’t be able to to credibly argue to the municipal board that the current eight-story limit is OK. The city’s planners, recommending an 18-storey building, won’t be able to testify that an eight-storey one makes good planning sense. The city will have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on outside experts to argue that the professionals in the bureaucracy were wrong.
But that’s a pill worth choking down, the committee agreed. City council gets to decide whether they’re right July 17.
East of downtown, the planning committee rejected a small townhouse complex that Domicile Developments proposed to build near the intersection of Orléans Boulevard and Innes Road. That development of about 50 units would be squeezed into less than a hectare formerly occupied by a market-garden operation that recently closed, and it isn’t popular because it’d be surrounded by an established neighbourhood of single-family homes.
“There has been consistent opposition to this development,” acknowledged city planning manager Fel Petti as he explained the proposal.
Domicile is known for its mid-rise downtown condos, but its style doesn’t fit in a suburban area like Chapel Hill, argued André Thivierge of the community association. Stacked townhouses with too little parking simply don’t belong in the area. Numerous acrimonious community meetings didn’t produce a plan the residents liked.
“We have been heard, but obviously not listened to, unfortunately,” Thivierge told the committee.
On the contrary, argued Domicile’s lawyer Alan Cohen. “I think this neighbourhood is lucky that my client came in with a program that is compatible, that is sensitive,” he said. He and planner Miguel Tremblay of private consultancy FoTenn showed drawings with Domicile’s townhouses at the same height as the nearby houses, with similar peaked roofs. The plan packs parking inside the complex instead of on its edges and the townhouses would be set back from their existing neighbours more than the zoning rules require.
A lower-density version of the plan simply doesn’t work, Tremblay said.
But that’s what the councillors said they wanted, changing the proposal to allow only single-family houses on corner of Domicile’s property that’s closest to the neighbours and rejecting the rest.
The vote was 5-4, however — with committee chairman Hume, who pulls a lot of weight on city council, on the losing side — meaning that a ratification from city council at that same July 17 meeting is not at all certain.
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