Heart Institute parking plans infuriate neighbours
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN September 12, 2013
OTTAWA — A major expansion to the University of Ottawa Heart Institute is coming with an extra that’s unpopular in its neighbourhood near Carling Avenue: a multi-storey parking garage.
It’s supposed to triple the number of cars that can go on land now holding a surface lot off Ruskin Avenue, by The Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus, from about 250 to about 750. That means more patients — especially heart patients who are frequently elderly and frequently weak — will be able to park close to where they’re getting treatment.
“The main driver for the need is we’re expanding the Heart Institute,” said Cameron Love, the hospital’s vice-president in charge of facilities. “It’s driven by growth demands associated with cardiac care … We have more patients that are going to be coming to the campus.”
Nearly 1,000 hospital staff park in lots blocks from the Civic campus, particularly near Dow’s Lake, to keep spaces open for patients, he said. There isn’t enough room now, and the crunch is going to get worse.
But the garage plans appear to violate an agreement struck in the 1990s among the hospital, the city and the hospital’s neighbours that said the surface lot, which is actually on what is technically city parkland, was all that would ever go on the property.
“We thought we had that negotiated in faith 18 years ago, and now it seems we’ve been ditched,” Paula Burchat of the Civic Hospital Neighbourhood Association said in an interview.
The group has copies of letters between its leaders and the former City of Ottawa spelling it out. Language was even put in the city’s official land-use plan, its most important urban-planning document, spelling out how this park-cum-parking-lot is supposed to be limited.
After amalgamation in 2001, though, the official plan was overhauled — almost completely rewritten, in fact — and the language was dropped. “The first response from the hospital is they did not know about the agreement. Now it seems they do know about the agreement, but they feel it is not applicable because in 2003 a new official plan for the city was written and they rescinded all the previous parts of the official plan,” Burchat said.
Plans have already advanced a long way. Amid debates on casinos and baseball stadiums over the summer, city council agreed to a formal lease on the land — the hospital has been using it free — charging $660,000 a year but returning $440,000 of it to the hospital to help build the garage. Up next is formal planning approval.
Love said that’s where the hospital hopes to get the community association onside. It has already made several adjustments, he said, including making sure the top level of the parkade is below the tops of the trees that now screen the site from its closest neighbours and pledging that the top level won’t have lights. The garage is meant to move cars in and out quickly, too.
“This whole development at the back on the Ruskin lot is built on principles of good access and decongestion,” he said.
Burchat doesn’t see how adding 500 more parking spots can make traffic move more smoothly. The association also wonders whether the deal with the city amounts to a subsidy for the parkade, one that wouldn’t apply if it were built somewhere else on the hospital’s property.
No, said Love. “It’s not it at all. We are going to have to spend $10 million in capital no matter how we look at it,” he said, and the really important thing is having the garage close to the Heart Institute’s new digs. A garage south of the hospital, close to Carling Avenue, is just too far.
The hospital has the backing of the councillor for the area, Katherine Hobbs. “People drive to hospitals. And that is a basic, fundamental in any city, anywhere. When you’re sick, you don’t take the bus home. Somebody picks you up,” she said. The garage is part of a larger compromise that has the city banning parking during the day on streets close to the Civic, which Hobbs said is a blessing for residents.
“I actually receive a lot of messages from people outside the area complaining that they’ve had to walk far and they’ve fallen down — there’s a lot of elderly people that go there,” Hobbs said.
The design changes are important concessions, Hobbs said, and the whole structure is designed to be easy to take down again some day when it’s not needed any more. Then the land can go back to being a park.
Don’t hold your breath for that, mind you.
“It will never be taken away until the hospital is taken away. And the hospital doesn’t know when it will be able to rebuild. They want to rebuild across the street, but that’s dependent on funding from the province,” she said. Not to mention co-operation from the National Capital Commission, which controls the Experimental Farm land on the other side of Carling.
“We really need to build a new hospital. We really need a new location for this community,” Love agreed. “Until that time happens, which could be upwards of 20 or 30 years, we need proper capacity.”
City council’s planning committee is to vote on the garage plan some time this fall. Love said that if everything goes perfectly smoothly, it could be open in 2015.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
ottawacitizen.com/greaterottawa
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