Diamond Mountain ‘completely safe,’ says developer
A Kelowna developer hopes city council today ignores a recommendation from staff to block the 1,000-home Diamond Mountain project.
Renee Wasylyk of Troika disputes the contention of city planners that smells and noise from the municipal dump would cause significant problems for future inhabitants of Diamond Mountain.
The neighbourhood, planned for 90 hectares of hilly land immediately south of the dump, would be “completely safe for residents,” the company says in a press release. If council accepts staff’s negative recommendation as the basis for blocking Diamond Mountain, Wasylyk says, other existing Glenmore developments with plans for future expansions, such as Wilden and Quail Ridge, as well as UBC Okanagan could be similarly impacted.
Plans for Diamond Mountain date back to 2011, with the developer preparing a so-called area structure plan that lays out building sites for a variety of homes, a road network, and amenities such as parks and trails.
“We want to bring to Kelowna a community that’s sustainable, that relieves the city's affordable housing issue, that fits a range of residents and families at different stages of life and scales of income,” Wasylyk said in the company’s release.
Although city had been supportive in general of the developer's intentions, that changed within the last 18 months. The city’s about-face is based on an updated environmental study that said the development's site proximity to the dump would be a major problem.
Future residents of Diamond Mountain would likely complain about smells, traffic, unsightliness, and noise, and begin campaigning for the dump to be shut down decades earlier than planned.
“The interests of the community at large and of the potential future residents of Diamond Mountain would not be served by pursuing residential development on the site,” city planners write in a report to council.
Should council accept the negative recommendation, Troika says it will use the property’s existing agricultural zoning to create 17, 10-acre lots “that only the wealthy could afford, and the public parks, lookouts, and trails would be lost.”