Rink deferral is a win for the public
Acting city manager Joe Creron once oversaw Kelowna’s parks systems, and so he has plenty of experience reconciling public and private interests. Perhaps it was that background that prompted him to provide a valuable and somewhat unusual interjection at Monday’s council meeting.
It was the kind of comment I don’t believe former city manager Ron Mattiussi ever made in his 11 years at the helm, because it sort of undermined city staff.
When Mattiussi spoke up at council, he was often riding to the rescue of some beleaguered staff member who wasn’t fully prepared, or who wasn’t giving councillors the kind of information they were looking for.
But Creron’s observation that he, too, wanted to see a more explicit provision of long-term public access to a skating rink in the massive Capri mall redevelopment emboldened those councillors who’d been suggesting there weren’t sufficient guarantees in that regard in the staff report before them.
As a result, council ended up deferring the master redevelopment plan and it’s highly likely a reworked version will come back to them in a few weeks that at least gives the appearance of ensuring the rink will always be open for public use, even if users have to pay to skate there.
The rink is presented as a public amenity, a key reason why council two years ago agreed to the property owner’s request for a significant boost in density for the redevelopment. About 2,200 homes are planned, in a mix of towers, low-rises, and townhouses, as well as 200,000 square feet of new commercial space.
“This will be Kelowna’s first high-rise neighbourhood, a collection of towers coming together,” said Terry Barton, the lead city staffer ably working on the project with developer ICR Projects.
The housing and commercial components were fine, exactly what the city wanted to see. But the rink proved the contentious point, ironically because the developers have actually increased its design size and made it more attractive.
Previously, the outdoor rink was projected to be little more than a seasonally-frozen pond. But now it’s planned to have a fullsize NHL surface in the winter, and be an amphitheatre and gathering space during the other seasons.
Barton told council public access to the middle of the development site would be guaranteed by statutory rights-ofway, with those passages presumably ensuring the rink could be used by all, not just the future residents of the new-look Capri.
Not clear, at least not at this point, is exactly who would own the rink, and whether people would have to pay to use it.
“This is a private development. The public will have access but the public will not own the rink. How it’s going to operate, I cannot answer that today,” Leo Mariotto, ICR’s representative, reasonably told council.
A rink that’s open to the public is certainly in the developer’s interest, Mariotto pointed out, because it will draw more people to the area and help improve the viability of all the new businesses.
But if ownership of the rink falls to a future strata residents’ council, Coun. Luke Stack warned, he could “guarantee” that within a few years that group would be trying to keep the public off its rink.
It was an instructive comment because Stack is not given to the kind of hyperbole that afflicts some of his council colleagues.
The prospect of a closed-off ice rink rightly gave some of them pause, and no doubt made them recall how other promised public benefits at two recent projects morphed into something other than what was originally on the table.
When the Innovation Centre was being negotiated, some councillors believed the public amenity would be a rooftop patio open to all. Now, there’s a restaurant and there might even have been a nightclub.
At Central Green, the promise was of lots of open public space at ground level. But the public realm has been squeezed almost out of recognition, as plans for tall towers gave way to an agglomeration of squat, ground-chewing low-rises.
For the Capri mall re-do, it was probably unrealistic at this point to have expected city officials and the developer to have worked out all operational details of a rink that is many years from being built. It won’t come until at least three towers have gone up, and the project’s full-build out is projected at about 20 years.
Still, council’s deferral of the master development plan at least allows for some discussion to occur about the rink, discussion that hasn’t so far taken place.
To the extent some of rink’s operational details can be confirmed now, the deferral is a win for the public.
A new city manager will be announced shortly, and Creron, 62, has expressed no interest in the job full-time.
He’s a caretaker manager, and Monday’s meeting showed he’s taking good care of the public’s interest.
Ron Seymour is a reporter with the Kelowna Daily Courier. This column appears on a recurring basis.