Ottawa Senators win bid for downtown arena on LeBreton Flats
Blair Crawford, Ottawa Citizen
Jun 23, 2022 • 1 hour ago • 2 minute read
The Ottawa Senators will moved downtown to a new arena on LeBreton Flats in a deal the National Capital Commission called a “transformational, city-building moment” that will fundamentally change downtown Ottawa.
The memorandum of understanding announced Thursday by the NCC will see the Senators and a bevy of deep-pocketed partners build a new rink on a 7.5 acre parcel of land on Albert Street between Preston Street and City Centre Avenue. The land, to be leased to the consortium, is just west of the site of Adisoke, Ottawa’s new central library now under construction.
While the hockey arena was the showpiece of Thursday’s announcement, the NCC will also begin accepting offers next week on a new mixed residential development on Wellington Street opposite the Canadian War Museum. That project, to be known as the Flats District, will see up to 800 new housing units in blocks of six storeys with set back towers of between 12 and 20 storeys. The housing will be modelled after neighbourhoods in the Netherlands with curb-less, narrow streets and a central aqueduct that currently flows underground through the area.
The housing development will include affordable housing units and an agreement to ensure economic benefit for suppliers and workers from the Algonquin Nation, on whose unceded land the development stands.
The NCC will accept requests for offers to lease the land from developers from June 29 until Oct. 5. It hopes to begin signing deals in early 2024 with construction beginning near the end of 2024.
Mayor Jim Watson, who sits on the NCC board of directors and likened the LeBreton Flats saga to the movie Groundhog Day, praised the agreement.
“Nothing is easy with LeBreton Flats,” Watson said. “But at the end of the day, the NCC has brought forward a plan that is realistic.”
A previous deal to bring the Senators downtown ended acrimoniously in 2018 in lawsuits and counter-lawsuits between the team’s former owner, Eugene Melnyk, and his partner in the deal, businessman John Ruddy.
“It’s an opportunity for us to thank the Senators for not giving up on this proposal,” Watson said Thursday. “The easy thing to do when things went south last time would be to pick up your notepad and your chequebook and leave. And you didn’t do that.”
Michael Foderick, an NCC board member from Toronto, said Thursday’s deal could transform downtown Ottawa in the way the Toronto Maple Leaf’s Air Canada Centre transformed downtown Toronto.
“This is fundamentally going to change, for the better, the nature of downtown Ottawa,” Foderick said. “We’re going see new residential units in a part of the city that needs that night life, that 24 hour presence there. I’ve seen how it’s transformed downtown Toronto.
Those residential units bring light around the clock, not just during office hours.
“Just when the office workers are heading out, that’s when the hockey fans are coming in. They come in with their jerseys and their kids. The come in for a bite to eat and they’re having fun downtown. It brings this whole element of life to the downtown.”
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...lebreton-flats
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