Did groundhog see Port tower’s shadow?
In honour of the season, let’s link Groundhog Day and the Port Dalhousie tower.
This could be addressed in two ways.
If we’re talking about the celebratory day itself, it goes as follows:
The groundhog popped out of its hole last Friday and saw its shadow, thus forecasting six more years of Port tower debate.
Or we could reference the movie Groundhog Day. You know, the flick where the same things happen over and over again.
Yeah, I think that’s the way to go.
Last month, three St. Catharines city councillors — Mike Britton, Carlos Garcia and Bruce Williamson — filed a freedom of information application to access a consultant’s report on a draft secondary plan for Port Dalhousie.
City hall staff had earlier denied a request to see the report, arguing it was an internal work in-progress that was not subject to public perusal.
Why the desire to see the report submitted to staff by consultants Macaulay Shiomi Howson Ltd. in November 2016?
Because there are those in Port Dalhousie who strongly suspect pressure was placed on the consultants to tweak their work to make the draft plan more development-friendly.
One way of supporting that theory is to contrast the draft report submitted to staff more than a year ago with the secondary plan unveiled at the city council public meeting last month.
Of particular interest is whether the proposed maximum building height for the west harbour area was increased during this interim, an outcome desired by a couple of developers.
OK, so what does this have to do with Bill Murray continually reliving Feb. 2?
Well, it’s admittedly a bit of a stretch, but in a sense we are revisiting a similarly suppressed report dealing with an earlier version of the Port Dalhousie tower.
Those of you who haven’t repressed memories of past development discussions in Port may recall the furor created in certain circles when developer Port Dalhousie Vitalization Corp. pulled its application at the last minute for the original Jack Diamond-designed, 30-storey tower development. Whatever joy opponents may have felt over this turn of events in November 2005 was tempered when city council refused to release the staff report on the proposal, a document that had been written and was mere days from being released.
These were testy times in the city, and many people suspected the reason PDVC pulled the plug was that someone on council had tipped them off that the city’s planning department was recommending the developer’s bid be rejected. The company denied any advance knowledge of the report’s contents, a claim that elicited many a guffaw, including several chuckles from yours truly.
But the developer was dead serious about wanting the document’s contents kept secret. It asserted the release of a negative report could lower the value of the property and threatened to seek “redress” from the city if that was the case.
City staff offered its own reasons for not releasing the report.
Then-city solicitor Annette Poulin said the document was never distributed to council, and the public meeting to discuss it never occurred. Thus, it had the status of an inter-office memo.
“Inter-office memos the public aren’t entitled to,” said Poulin. “The public are only entitled to whatever is a minute of council or is dealt with by council.”
That was more or less the argument given by city solicitor Heather Salter in this most recent instance, with Salter adding municipal councillors have no more rights than citizens to access such documents.
In 2005, several entities, including The Standard, filed a Freedom of Information application to obtain the planning report. Shortly before these applications were to proceed to another adjudication level, PDVC said it no longer objected to the report’s release. (A new development proposal had been made — Son of Port Tower — and a positive staff review of it was forthcoming.)
To no one’s surprise, the staff report on the original proposal was negative, largely due to the tower’s 30-storey height.
The fact a final ruling was never made on the FOI applications was a bummer for many because it left unresolved the issue of what reports could be considered public property.
Hopefully, this latest exercise will answer that question.
Otherwise, we’re in for another Groundhog Day.