Going all in on LeBreton: Anatomy of a successful bid
Don Butler, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: May 8, 2016 | Last Updated: May 8, 2016 2:45 PM EDT
On a pleasant September day in 2014, Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk, his adviser, Ken Villazor, and Cyril Leeder, president of Senators Sports & Entertainment, had a conversation with momentous implications.
Earlier that day, the National Capital Commission had invited private sector groups to submit plans to redevelop LeBreton Flats, which the federal government had expropriated and cleared 50 years earlier.
The announcement wasn’t a surprise. NCC chief executive Mark Kristmanson had signalled his intentions a few weeks before during a breakfast speech. Melnyk’s executives had been hearing persistent buzz that something was imminent.
But the NCC announcement meant it was decision time. Did Melnyk want to pursue the opportunity or not?
“We’d been through a rather tumultuous journey in trying to find some solution to our challenges with the marketplace in Ottawa,” Villazor said last week, before an NCC-ordered gag on public comment was re-imposed.
Melnyk badly needed something that would add strength to his wobbly balance sheet. Earlier efforts to locate a casino at the Canadian Tire Centre and to make the property a hub for major league soccer had crashed and burned.
“We had the conversation with Eugene to say, ‘This is a pretty significant project in terms of effort and pursuit costs. If we’re in, we’re all in,”’ Villazor recalled. “And he made the decision reasonably quickly at that point to say, ‘We’re all in. Let’s take this as far as we can.'”
That decision triggered 14 months of frantic work by a team that grew to include more than 200 people, who produced a 2,000-page submission.
The effort paid off when the NCC announced April 28 that an evaluation committee had ranked the proposal from Melnyk’s team, called RendezVous LeBreton, clearly ahead of a competing bid by the Devcore Canderel DLS Group.
As a result, RendezVous will have the opportunity to negotiate an agreement with the NCC to develop 21.6 hectares of the last large piece of undeveloped real estate in Ottawa’s core.
This newspaper spoke to key members of the RendezVous team to find out how its successful bid came together. It’s a tale of relationships and local connections, near super-human effort and critical choices.
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It was obvious that Melnyk’s company would need a lot of help to tackle such an immense project. “We knew we would have to assemble a pretty broad team,” Villazor said.
The first member was Matt Rossetti, a Detroit architect who, with his father, had designed the Senators’ current arena more than two decades ago.
The Senators decided they wanted, as much as possible, to build the team around Ottawa-based members, Villazor said. “We knew it was going to be a long project if we did win it, and you want people who have got skin in the game in the community.”
Melnyk recruited Trinity Development’s John Ruddy — who has a box at Senators games — as the project’s master planner and builder.
Born and bred in Ottawa, Ruddy was a partner in the consortium that revitalized Lansdowne Park. Since then, said Trinity president and CEO Fred Waks, he’s become “the poster boy for how to redevelop downtown real estate and make it vibrant.”
Trinity brought retail expertise. But it also tapped into a formidable trio of deep-pocketed real estate investors to help finance the $3.5-billion development: the Canadian Real Estate Investment Trust, the Ontario Pension Trust and Brookfield, a global company with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets.
Another key early recruit was consultant Graham Bird, who Leeder approached to serve as project manager. One of the most plugged-in figures in the city, Bird has steered several high-profile projects in recent years, including Lansdowne Park, the new Shaw Centre and the Royal Ottawa Hospital.
Bird, in turn, enlisted top-dog architect Barry Hobin, who has an unparalleled understanding of Ottawa and its history. “Barry was obviously very key for us,” said Villazor. “Everybody knows his stature in Ottawa and his familiarity with the city.”
Bit by bit, the team expanded. Ken Hoppner of development firm Morley Hoppner, who’d worked on Sensplex projects, was an early recruit. Renée Daoust, a Montreal urbanist who has great credibility with the NCC, was brought in to design the project’s landscaping.
Perkins + Will, an American architecture and design firm that had helped out with NCC approvals for Windmill’s neighbouring Zibi project, added its expertise in transit-oriented design. Gatineau-based builder Brigil was approached because RendezVous wanted representation from the Quebec side of the Ottawa River.
Hobin lined up the non-profit Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp. to develop 25 per cent of the residential units as affordable housing. The CCOC had been eyeing LeBreton for affordable housing for more than two decades, and jumped at the opportunity.
“We respect a lot of the partners, so we knew it would be a well-put together project,” said executive director Ray Sullivan. Bird’s involvement gave him comfort, as well. “He’s somebody who’s passionate about city building and civic engagement.”
Villazor approached another important partner, Abilities Centre Ottawa, a small volunteer group that formed two years ago to create Canada’s second Abilities Centre (the first opened in Whitby in 2012).
The involvement of the Abilities Centre – a recreation and social complex open to all – helped spread accessibility and inclusiveness ideas to RendezVous’ entire plan, said board chair Emily Glossop. “So many people are seeing our community through a new lens – a lens that sees everybody.”
RendezVous’ team was largely complete by Feb. 18, 2015, when the NCC announced that it and three other teams were being invited to develop detailed proposals for LeBreton Flats.
The real work was just beginning.
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Given the immensity of the project, the time allotted to RendezVous and the other teams to develop their proposals was relatively short. Meeting the Dec. 15, 2015 deadline meant a lot of seven-day work weeks. Indeed, aside from Thanksgiving Day, Bird’s office never closed last year.
“There were lots of times when there were five or six design teams going in different directions,” said Hobin, adding that his firm was “kind of the glue that pulled all that together.”
The team figured out early on that it needed to develop the entire LeBreton property, including an optional 12.3-hectare parcel west of the main development site, to make the project work.
There was some debate about where to put the proposed “major event centre,” which would be the Senators’ future home. In the first renditions, it was positioned near Booth and Wellington.
But after further consideration, it was moved to its present location further west, allowing patrons streaming out after events to walk to the planned Pimisi or Bayview light rail stations and spread out through the retail and restaurant district.
Figuring out how to deal with the future LRT tracks, which will bisect LeBreton, was a major planning headache.
“We just kept pounding away at it,” Bird recalled. “We’ve got to get this thing to go away. It cannot be part of a future city.”
It was Bird who first conceived the idea of covering the tracks by extending a proposed parking structure over the LRT. The decision gave RendezVous an important advantage over DCDLS when the two projects were evaluated.
The NCC also liked the fact that RendezVous rediscovered and adopted the original street grid in LeBreton Flats. Going back to that grid, Hobin said, divided the property into parcels. “As the parcels develop, you can develop a block-by-block strategy for development, and therefore you can build in variety.”
RendezVous got another boost in December, when the Building and Construction Trades Council agreed to provide a letter of support.
The letter from the council, which estimates RendezVous’ project will create 22,000 construction and support jobs, described its role in supplying skilled labour and recruiting and training aboriginal apprentices. (DCDLS didn’t approach the council for a similar letter.)
Tradesmen in Ottawa and Gatineau are “super excited” about the redevelopment, said council president Mike Reid, who was seven when his family was displaced from LeBreton Flats by the 1960s demolitions. They had to move to Kemptville to find housing they could afford, Reid said. “It was as if I went to another planet.”
He’s thrilled that LeBreton is finally coming back to life. “What they want to do with this is absolutely phenomenal. It’s just going to revitalize the entire downtown core.”
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There was a last-minute scramble after RendezVous and DCDLS submitted their proposals in December. For the first time, the NCC told the two teams they were expected to provide 3D models of their proposals for the public consultation session.
That and other late NCC requests “probably added $200,000 or $300,000 worth of expenditures at the last minute,” Hobin said. “We were just running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to pull all this stuff together.”
The two bids were unveiled at an open house in January. DCDLS presented its flashy plan filled with museums and attractions first, followed by Hobin and the RendezVous proposal.
“That was really tough,” Hobin said. “You’re kind of overwhelmed — wow, all of this eye candy. It took a while to unpack it and go, ‘Just a second now, how much of this is real?'”
Nerves tightened as decision day approached. Both teams had invested enormous effort and time and considerable money in developing their plans. The stakes were high.
The NCC had managed to keep its choice secret. Until planning chief Steve Willis announced that RendezVous’ bid was the highest rated, “we had no idea one way or the other,” Villazor said.
Though Melnyk permitted himself a small smile when the decision was announced, the reaction in the room by the Senators’ group was muted. There were no high-fives, no triumphant whoops.
There was a reason for that, Villazor said. At that point, the choice of RendezVous was just a staff recommendation, subject to approval by the board. “We wanted to be careful not to overreact until the board had formally decided.
“Cyril made a very good analogy afterwards,” said Villazor. “He said, ‘It’s like winning the first round of the playoffs. There’s still a long way to go.'” That didn’t stop RendezVous members from gathering at the restaurant Beckta for a modest celebration, however.
Going forward, many things remain to be resolved. According to Waks, the partners are still negotiating “all facets” of the financial structure. While Trinity will be the master planner and builder, he said, “it would be premature to say who’s responsible for what.”
Nor has RendezVous yet figured out who will be on its negotiating team, though Waks said Trinity will be the lead negotiator.
The coming months and years will doubtless test the cohesion and commitment of some of the partners, not least because of Melnyk’s notorious impatience. “It’s one thing to win,” said Hobin. “It’s another thing to actually build something we’re proud of.”
Bird is optimistic. “We really had the best of the best on public realm, the best world knowledge on master planning and one of the best world knowledge on entertainment. They all got along well. Bit by bit, they made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
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