Gateway ‘eyesore’ now: Riel
Hotel project still in works, official says
Once again the city is trying to encourage development in the so-called Gateway area around The Parkway and Crawford Dr., but Coun. Keith Riel isn’t impressed with the results of the last attempt.
“It’s a sad state of affairs down there with just the Tim Hortons and the tourist centre … in kind of a dust bowl area,” the Ashburnham Ward councillor said during the planning committee meeting Monday night. “We’ve been waiting for something to happen here and it just hasn’t come to fruition…. It’s an eyesore.”
Council endorsed a mass rezoning of roughly 40 properties around the visitors’ centre property, on Crawford Dr. east of The Parkway and north to The Queensway. It would allow certain commercial uses, such as banks and restaurants, on the industrial properties.
Council is adding potential uses to the zoning restrictions to encourage development on the industrial properties in the Lansdowne West Secondary Plan area.
The visitors’ centre site falls in that area.
The city gave the property to Roshan Holdings in return for a free 10-year lease of the tourism office on the property. The rest of the property remains largely undeveloped. A long-awaited hotel and convention centre hasn’t been built. And a relatively recent push for a Lowes home improvement store seems to have faded.
Roshan needs that development for it to make a financial return on this project, planning and development services director Malcolm Hunt said.
“It has been a long time in the making,” Hunt acknowledged. “The hotel complex is still going to proceed.”
The prospect of a casino being built in the city has renewed interest in the property, Hunt said.
Hunt pointed out that council selected the visitors’ centre area as one of the possible locations for the casino if it’s built in the city.
The city owns property next to the visitors’ centre site that it could make available for a private-sector operator of a casino.
Town Ward Coun. Bill Juby voted against the mass rezoning after he expressed concerns about the possibility of more office space being built in the area.
“We’ve got over 200,000 square feet of vacant office space in the downtown core, which is where our Official Plan has earmarked office space to go,” he said.
The visitors’ centre site would retain its zoning that would allow a regional scale office facility with at least 1,500 square metres of floor space.
The Downtown Business Improvement Area has asked the municipality to bump that minimum threshold up to about 32,300 square feet of floor space, which would reduce the likelihood of it losing more office jobs to other areas of the city.
The regional scale office facility zoning made it possible for the federal government to pull many of its jobs in the city from its former building on King St. downtown to a new building on Crawford Dr. last year. The loss of jobs from the downtown has left office space vacant and has taken some of the spinoff economic activity out of the city’s commercial core.
Council’s agreeing to remove the regional scale office facility zoning from the Crawford Dr. property where the federal government office building already exists. The office use would become a legal non-conforming use. But another office could still be built on the visitors’ centre site.
The item returns to the regular council meeting Aug. 6.