Latest central library plan ignores new lay of the land
A city plan, released Tuesday, for a new central library and the buildings next to it is built on a layout for Slater and Albert streets that’s about to change.
The two plans for the same land at the southeast corner of LeBreton Flats don’t work together. The city can’t do them both at the same time. Yet officially, that’s what’s going to happen.
The central library is a major civic investment, meant to bridge downtown and LeBreton Flats for a century. How the pieces combine is really, really important. Doing it in separate chunks, with expired information, promising to work out the details later, is how we’ll get trash.
“It’s completely understandable that residents would be frustrated by this,” said the area’s councillor, Catherine McKenney. “Outside of these walls, they do not expect city departments to work in silos.”
Let’s take the road situation first. This property is where Albert and Slater split as they go east into downtown, turning into a little plate of spaghetti between Booth Street and Bronson Avenue. They carry a lot of city buses now; once the light-rail system opens and most of the buses stop running there, the city intends to tidy the streets up by moving the Albert-Slater split farther east and closing a couple of hundred metres of Slater.
There’ll be less asphalt and intersections that are easier to figure out because they aren’t designed for rush-hour bus traffic, the thinking goes. Sounds good. City staff settled on this plan last fall, shared it publicly, took comments, finalized it, and are due to present it to city council’s transportation committee in April.
The new plan for the library and its surroundings, in the form of a rezoning and officialplan amendment worked up for the city by the consulting firm FoTenn, doesn’t take any of this into account. Though they were released Tuesday, the plan and a stack of technical studies supporting it are dated last April and May, with a couple of straggly bits from the summer. They use the current, soon-to-change layout of Albert and Slater streets.
Usually rezoning applications come from private landowners and developers. In this case, the land involved is owned by the city government and by the National Capital Commission. They want a coherent plan for the properties before constructing the library and likely selling the other land, so the city is in the unusual position of commissioning a plan and then submitting it to itself for approval. The city and NCC have split the $243,210 bill, the city says.
The rezoning plan acknowledges in a few places that the city intends to change Albert and Slater, but when it was written nobody yet knew how. Now we know how.
“This is a process by which one department has a submitted plan from May 2017 that was, from what I can tell, dusted off and put back out into the public realm. That should never happen,” McKenney said. Although she doesn’t control the process directly, she’s asked the city’s planners to redo the plan using current information.
As it is, the plan would allow 818 new residential units on the properties, 12,340 square metres of retail space, 17,012 square metres of commercial space, plus the 19,970 square metres for the library. Underground parking would be shared among multiple buildings, including the library. The plan doesn’t propose specific designs but it does look at the general shapes of buildings and how they’d fit together.
The proposal would zone land at Albert and Booth, right next to the Pimisi light-rail station, for 25-storey buildings, in keeping with the city’s philosophy of clustering tall, dense offices and dwellings next to major transit stops. So far, so good.
Moving east on Albert, the plan proposes a six-storey building, then an open plaza, then the fourstorey central library on land now being used as a staging area for light-rail construction. Across Albert to the south are more sixand four-storey buildings, marching up the hill toward Bronson, broken up by another plaza.
That’s where the plans ram into each other. The new layout of Albert and Slater streets will chop up the land south of the library into different chunks. Doesn’t matter, the city says. “The lands affected by the proposed Albert/Slater realignment (550 Albert Street) are only subject to an Official Plan Amendment to designate them as mixed-use,” reads a statement from planning manager Douglas James. “While it is not a requirement that any road alignment be considered with respect to designation of a property under the City’s Official Plan, the Official Plan designation proposed with the planning applications concept will maintain consistency with the road realignment, if and when approved.”
FoTenn’s planners seemed to think the road layout did make a difference.
The two plazas on opposites sides of Albert are placed so they can join up someday if the city closes Albert Street there, the plan says, but that won’t happen because it’s already chosen to close Slater instead. The buildings were all laid out “to complement the potential library building and central plaza.”
“All future development on this portion of the lands should maintain this building profile,” the plan says, meaning the southern building should roughly mirror the library. Which will be tricky, what with the new end of Slater Street running through the middle of it.
The plan includes a transportation study from last May that studied the development’s effects on car, bus and pedestrian traffic at intersections that won’t exist. It proposed a bike lane on a stretch of Slater that will disappear. The new street layout creates an odd-shaped triangular lot next to Bronson that will take some skilful architecting to design nicely. The planners working on the project didn’t see that coming.
Multiple weird errors contaminate the rezoning plan, including a map showing where the library is in the city that labels Old Ottawa East as Ottawa South, Sandy Hill as Ottawa East, Lowertown as Sandy Hill and New Edinburgh as Lowertown. Other maps (including on the very first page) mislabel Slater Street as Laurier Avenue. Evidently nobody at the city’s real-estate office, which accepted the consultant’s work, looked it over.
Even if the work were good, it’s garbage now. The city commissioned a plan from a consultant, sat on it for 10 months while it became obsolete, issued it publicly, and now wants citizens to waste time thinking about a fairy tale.
“I don’t believe that residents can comment on the plan as it stands,” McKenney said. “It would seem to me that it’s very detailed. The amount of description in the plans is very detailed, so this is the time that we need intensive public consultation on those plans and I don’t believe that that can happen unless we have the areas scoped out properly.”