Planners want the Flats to be great — at the right price

LeBreton Flats needs to be a showpiece neighbourhood once it’s rebuilt, the city says, as long as it costs the city government as little as possible.

It wants nothing to do with cleaning up contaminated ground in the former industrial neighbourhood, for instance. It wants users of a new hockey arena there to pay for extra transit service for games and concerts. It doesn’t want new parks and civic spaces there to be too fancy to maintain.

This is all laid out in the bargaining positions Mayor Jim Watson should take into talks with the National Capital Commission and the consortium led by the Ottawa Senators that’s planning the massive redevelopment, according to the city’s planning department. The department released the recommendations Friday afternoon, ahead of a vote by city council’s powerful finance committee on Nov. 7.

The city isn’t exactly a partner in the plans. The National Capital Commission owns LeBreton Flats and will sell much of it to the RendezVous LeBreton Group with the Senators at the head, if the two reach a final agreement on how the redevelopment should go. But the project will need city roads, city water and sewer pipes and city bus and train service and will be governed by city plans and zoning rules. So the city will be at the table with the NCC and the Sens group to hammer out agreements over several months.

Refusing to pay for any of the cleanup of the property on the Ottawa River west of Parliament Hill is a big deal. The city has a “brownfields remediation” program under which it typically splits the cost of removing poisoned soil with a property owner looking to build something new on the site of, say, an old gas station.

John Ruddy, the head of Trinity Development Group and the Senators’ major partner in the LeBreton plans, has said the consortium expected to seek government money under general-purpose programs like the one for brownfields.

But in this case, the cost of the cleanup of a district that used to have scrapyards, rail yards and other heavy industry mixed in with working-class homes is estimated at $170 million, a bank-breaking number for a program that usually deals in single-digit millions at most.

The NCC evicted everyone more than 50 years ago for an office complex it never built.

“Given the historic decision of the federal government to acquire and demolish the LeBreton Flats community in the early 1960s, it is the city’s position that the federal government should be solely responsible for remediating its property prior to development,” the new city document says.

The city should also be sure to bill the Senators or whatever entity ends up owning the new downtown rink at the centre of the LeBreton bid for beefing up OC Transpo service, the document says. It does that with the renovated football stadium at Lansdowne Park, where gamegoers get free bus rides to games with their tickets because everyone pays a transit fare whether they take the bus or not.

“The city would ... ensure that it is understood that the incremental costs of providing enhanced transit service to the Major Event Centre (that is, the hockey rink) would be borne by the users of the centre,” the recommendations say.

And if anybody wants the city to borrow money to finance anything, the way it did to rebuild Frank Clair Stadium into TD Place for the Lansdowne renovation, the city wants to know exactly how it’ll get paid back.

The city also wants to know who will be responsible for the parks and plazas that are major features of the RendezVous LeBreton Group plan.

Don’t assume it’ll be the municipal government, it says.

“The public-realms components that the NCC and its preferred proponent envision as part of this phase of redevelopment may presume municipal involvement,” the document says. “It is in the city’s interest to have those roles articulated and clarified. The city needs to understand how the public realm improvements will be delivered, and by whom.” Even once everything is done, which could take as long as 30 years, there are enough federal monuments and institutions (like the new Holocaust memorial and the Canadian War Museum) on and near the Flats that the NCC should stay involved, the city says.

Finally, the report proposes to bring negotiations over the future of the Canadian Tire Centre into the mix because if the Senators move to LeBreton Flats, there’ll be a major building in the west end of town that’ll need a new use.

The planning staff expect that “preliminary discussions regarding the future of the current CTC building and lands may take place as part of the negotiations related to the downtown arena,” the report says. “Staff are, therefore, seeking a mandate to participate in any such discussions, to ensure that any options being discussed provide specific reference to the impact on the west-end communities.”

What happens to the CTC will probably be worked out after the LeBreton Flats business and will involve separate consultations and negotiations, the document says.