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Post by CRCP on Jul 18, 2007 10:50:45 GMT -5
Member's posts follow:
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Post by John Zeger on Jul 18, 2007 11:10:55 GMT -5
In the most brazen display of hutzpah that I have seen since coming to Kelowna, the developer of this project was proposing to build a 21 storey highrise in a zone that only allows 15 storeys (a 51% increase from the zone standards) and to construct a monstrous structure the floor plate of which occupies nearly 100% of the site area. In regards to the latter the developer was requesting a variance that would allow a building base of more than double what is allowed under the C-7 zone!
Architect Keith Funk representing the developer said that the problem wasn't that the proposal was not in accordance with the standards set in the Zoning Bylaw but rather that the Bylaw needed to be revised. More hutzpah!
After a motion by APC member Lorne Antle to recommend in favour of the development permit could not find a seconder, a motion to table the matter to allow the developer to come back with something more reasonable was passed unanimously. However, before the vote was taken Funk specifically stated that if given another month the developer probably wouldn't come back with anything significantly different. This should be interesting.
Things like this happen when variances to the Zoning Bylaw are constantly being approved with nary a thought given to doing so. As a result developers think that they can get away with anything. This time they didn't and I only wish that the APC (and city council) would apply the rules more stringently to all development proposals in the future as they did to this particular one.
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Post by John Zeger on Jul 20, 2007 9:10:32 GMT -5
It was bound to happen sooner or later with all of the variances being approved in the past few years by Kelowna city council for the height and other features of development proposals that have come before them. I am referring to the audacious request that was recently made to the Advisory Planning Commission (APC) for a 21 storey highrise on St. Paul Street in the downtown C-7 zone which allows for a maximum building height of only 15 storeys.
Developers have been pushing the envelope and have met with little or no resistance from a spineless city council that lives by the motto “any development, anywhere, anytime”. As council operates as if the city Zoning Bylaw was so much toilet paper, they regard planning standards for height and density as a joke and constantly grant variances and concessions to developers like they were handing out Halloween candy.
So having a (not unreasonable) feeling that he get away with anything, the developer of a proposed residential highrise project on St. Paul Street came before the APC asking for approval for a proposal that would see the building height at fifty percent above the permissible limit and a building base of more than double the maximum allowable and six other variances to boot! Well, this time the envelope held, and the APC members wisely put their foot down and told the developer to go back to the drawing board. If our city council hadn’t been so lax in the past and played fast and loose with the Zoning Bylaw, this bad joke wouldn’t have been foisted on the city planning department and the volunteers of the APC and we all could have been saved a lot of time and trouble.
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