Until we see a shovel with Sens logo, these are only baby steps on LeBreton
Kelly Egan, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: January 25, 2018 | Last Updated: January 25, 2018 7:01 PM EST
It is the giant green light LeBreton Flats has been waiting for, we are told, but for all the flashing yellows in my head.
And so it was a surprisingly joyless act of city-building at NCC headquarters on Thursday morning, over in less than half an hour, with no cake or popping corks.
At the precise moment, there was so little applause in the NCC board room, it sounded like three people tapping snow off their Sorels. Eugene Melnyk, rarely lost for words, was there but said nothing.
Out in the corridor afterwards, John Ruddy, the other project kingpin, told reporters “So, there you have it, right? This is a great next step of many future steps,” but it sounded more like a question than a conclusion — a quiz pass, not the final exam.
Was this not a great breakthrough of historical proportions, 60 years in the making, the start of a transformation of the western edge of downtown? Where is its champion, today or during the long horizon until pucks are dropped? We shall see who emerges, and when, but it seemed the reaction was restrained and tentative, as though the wheels still hold some wobble.
Mayor Jim Watson, also an NCC board member, provided some insight, maybe inadvertently.
“I have lots of ideas on how this thing can be derailed but I don’t want to share them because I want the thing to succeed. We’ve waited 50 to 60 years to get something on that site.”
Maybe I’m a little jaded on LeBreton, like the rest of the city, but until I see Melnyk or his stand-in driving a backhoe and starting to dig a giant hole in the ground, part of me is still skeptical the downtown arena will ever happen.
Aside from the confirmation of an agreement in principle on the $4-billion project, a couple of important developments came to the forefront at a meeting of NCC commissioners.
Firstly, the Canadian taxpayer is basically going to eat the cost of the site cleanup, which must be a great relief to the RendezVous LeBreton group. “The parties have agreed on a fair market value for the land, net of remediation costs,” is how the NCC explained the “highlight.”
In other words, if the 49 acres in question are worth $100 million and the cleanup costs $50 million (for argument’s sake), then the NCC nets only $50 million. Nice deal for RendezVous, which can now deduct the cost of all the booby-traps it will find in remediating the soil on the site, said to be seriously contaminated from decades of dirty industry.
Secondly, the NCC, a Crown corporation with committees all over the place, has signalled a time frame in which it will essentially get out of the way and let the private sector get some dirt moving. The land “conveyance” is to occur in the 2019-20 window, or in 12 to 24 months.
Having a plan to get government “out of the way” is critically important to speed things along. Think of it. It took nearly two full years (from April 2016) to arrive at a point where an agreement in principle with a private consortium was ready to sign. Two years? And it needs to be said that the “master development agreement” is still months away from being ready. Just guessing here, but “hurry the hell up” is probably not Chapter 1 in the government handbook. (The NCC said it held 40 meetings and 120 hours of talks.)
Thirdly, it becomes pretty clear the NCC is more interested in the “public realm” aspect of the project than, say, housing, of which the Flats is supposed to have plenty, fulfilling a long-held promise rooted in the destruction of a lower-class neighbourhood in the 1960s.
Phase 1 was given a time frame of 2018 to 2032, while Phase 2, on the western part of the Flats, was slotted into 2032 to 2036, a stretch during which only some of us will be alive.
And now that we are down to one proponent, why must all the details be kept secret? What does the agreement in principle say? What is the “fair market price” the parties have agreed to?
NCC chair Marc Seaman said the board spent four hours Wednesday on the LeBreton file, privately going through the history and discussing the current agreement. Four hours? And what does the public get? Four paragraphs of highlights.
At face value, it is a momentous step, one that may lead to fundamental changes in how the capital lives, works and plays. But, behind the curtain, there are nerves in the wings, surely.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email [email protected]
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columni...th-sens-logo-only-baby-steps-on-lebreton
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