Green hard to find at Central Green
It may be central, but the green is hard to find at Central Green. What’s taking shape at the prime development site near downtown Kelowna doesn’t much resemble the plan envisioned years ago. This isn’t news. More than two years ago, your favourite daily newspaper described the elimination of three planned high-rises from the site in favour of smaller buildings as uninspired in the extreme.
As a development project, it sounds straight outta Glenmore, we wrote in September 2015.
What is news, however, is how tardily and theatrically Kelowna city councillors seem to have realized this fact.
They are the ones, after all, who have approved the form and character of every squat and unremarkable low-rise building either constructed or in progress on what was intended to have been a showcase development property.
Now, they profess themselves to be so shocked by their own handiwork that they’ve put the brakes on the latest drab-looking fivestorey rental building planned for Central Green.
“We had a comprehensive plan and we’re not matching our comprehensive plan,” Coun. Ryan Donn harumphed at Monday’s meeting. Sounds like Ryan Donn version 2018 is gearing up to take on Ryan Donn version 2015 in this fall’s municipal election.
In September 2015, Donn was among the councillors to approve a re-allocation of density on the Central Green site that has led directly to the result he now finds so upsetting.
Al Stober Construction, Central Green’s developer, surely expected routine approval for the 108 suite rental building. The design was described in the usual blandishments of being “modern” with “strong vertical elements” that constituted an appealing “urban aesthetic”.
To grease the wheels for approval, council was told by city staff there was still some hope that taller and more attractive buildings might possibly be built right along Harvey Avenue in the future, to achieve the 500 units specified in Central Green’s development writ.
Then Coun. Brad Sieben had the good idea to ask the developer to come to the mike and say if that was in fact the case.
If Mayor Colin Basran had been at the meeting instead of absent, he might have ruled that request out of order, as Basran has said Central Green as it’s taking shape will be an “amazing community.
Put on the spot, the developer’s agent, Bob Daigenais, might reasonably have demurred or just said in an anodyne way that anything was still possible.
Instead, with admirable if perhaps illadvised candour, he said nope, there was almost no way a high-rise would ever be built on Central Green. The ground’s too soggy, was the suggestion, and shoring it up for a high-rise would be too expensive.
More likely, he said, would be a long lowrise stretching along the south side of Harvey Avenue.
Since the city never clearly specified that high-rises had to be built when they sold most of Central Green for $6 million to Al Stober Construction in 2014, the developers will be well within their rights to present exactly that kind of project, so long as the ultimate density is achieved.
It’s an open question, for now, how much the average Kelowna resident cares that high-rises probably won’t be built at Central Green. Coun. Charlie Hodge, who was on the council that set the original development terms, has consistently criticized its evolution into a low-rise precinct, saying it’s a betrayal of an important community vision.
But city staff, to their credit, directly contacted the many hundreds of people who endorsed the high-rise vision when the plan began changing. And almost nobody responded, or showed at council up to protest.
Still, in years to come, or perhaps even as soon as this fall’s municipal election, people might look at Central Green and idly wonder whoever approved such humdrum housing.
Ron Seymour is a Daily Courier reporter. To contact the writer: ron. seymour@ok.bc.ca or phone 250-470-0750.