District councillors passed third reading on a temporary law on Tuesday, restricting development on six Cleveland Avenue properties until downtown-zoning consultations can be completed.
Director of planning Jonas Velaniskis told council that so far, public consultations about zoning in the downtown have suggested people want to keep Cleveland Avenue a distinct main street, make sure public open space works with development and secure employment space.
“What we’ve heard from the community so far, as well as from our design panel and discussions with council, is that Cleveland really deserves a separate treatment than the rest of the downtown streets,” he said at Tuesday night’s council meeting.
While most of the real estate on Cleveland Avenue is currently defacto regulated by existing bylaws that limit develop by the amount of parking space available, Velaniskis identified six large properties that were not.
Those properties, including the August Jack Motor Inn and Chieftain Centre, will be restricted under the new law.
The bylaw doesn’t restrict height by storey, but instead uses a planning calculation called the “floor area ratio.” The ratio takes into account both the size of the lot and the square footage in a building.
The new temporary bylaw, passed unanimously after a public hearing on the issue Tuesday, allows a maximum floor area ratio of 1.5 for the six lots identified.
As an example, that would mean if a parcel of land on Cleveland Avenue is 1,000-square feet in total, the district would only allow a building that has a total of 1,500-square feet of usage floor space.
A two-storey building on that lot could have up to 750-square feet on each floor, or a three-storey building could have 500-square feet on each floor.
In this way, a floor area ratio can be used by city planners to balance a building’s height with the use of the property’s total space.
The bylaw expires in just four months, on March 31, 2018. Velaniskis said it will be replaced by a comprehensive plan to zone all of downtown early in the new year. “It’s really just buying time to make sure we can finish the community engagement downtown,” said Velaniskis.
He added that the law isn’t intended to restrict height, but “to avoid that boxy effect.”
The promise of a short time span for the interim law did not comfort Tejinder Bhullar, the owner of the August Jack Motel, who expressed her frustration to councillors at the public hearing.
Bhullar has owned the property since 2003, and she said she felt “targeted” by the new law.“We think it’s unfair,” she told councillors. “It seems like someone just woke up one day and said they were going to change the bylaw, just for these four large properties. This will affect the value of a lifelong investment, big time.”
“Normally we’ve seen the land value going up, but this bylaw will bring it lower than we ever imagined,” she said.
Bhullar said there were plans to add to the motel, but the new bylaw will restrict what she is able to do with her property, and the value of the land if she decides to sell.
The law also affects a number of other properties, including the Chieftain Plaza north of Pemberton Avenue, and two parcels along Winnipeg Street.
No other landowners presented at the public hearing on Tuesday night. The bylaw must be approved by Ministry of Transportation before returning to council in early December.
**Please note this story has been modified since it was first posted to clarify the timing around enforcement of the temporary bylaw.
