[Dartmouth] Lotus Point Living | 25 m | 7 fl | Completed

[spaustin]

Good news for Downtown Dartmouth! Harbour East Community Council approved the project this evening. There is one regulatory hurdle still to overcome though. The heritage designation for the Elliot House applies to not just the structure, but the entire lot. This includes the "historic" gravel parking lot around back. Since the developer plans to build on a portion of the Elliot House lot and since you can't have a building on two lots at once, he has to subdivide the Elliot House property and consolidate it with the rest of the block and apply to Regional Council to deregister the back section. Regional Council can only deregister a heritage property at a public hearing. A bit of a tangly process!

The Heritage Trust was there this evening with a lawyer from Pink Larkin alleging procedural issues with the way HRM has approached the approval of this project. They feel that the property should be delisted before considering the proposal and that staff should have looked at Policy CH-1 instead of CH-2 (one is for building adjacent to a heritage property while the other is for construction that directly affects a heritage property).

I find it really unfortunate that they seem to want to obstruct this project, because it's a big win for heritage preservation. The historic house on site is not only being retained, it's being retained as a stand-alone structure. It would have been very easy to have gone the other route of knocking it down or reducing it to just a facade. I don't think you can ask for more!

There is zero chance that Regional Council will refuse to remove the heritage designation so it would seem that legal action is the only real threat to this one. Hopefully it won't come to pass and we'll see construction soon.