pixel
Register User
Close
The Brampton Guardian The Brampton Guardian The Brampton Guardian The Brampton Guardian
SEARCH SITE
The Brampton Guardian
City staff slams Heart Lake highrise proposal
Tuesday September 2 2008
PAM DOUGLAS
Brampton planning staff has slammed a developer’s controversial proposal to build multiple highrises on a site in Heart Lake, recommending councillors reject the application.

It’s too big, too dense, and inconsistent with city planning principles, according to a city staff report released yesterday after months of study and consultation with other local agencies.
The report concludes the proposal “does not represent good planning.”

Politicians will vote on the recommendation next week, but not before one more consultation with residents. A special council meeting that will double as a public meeting on the subject will be held Monday, 7 p.m., at the Marriott Hotel on Biscayne Crescent. Residents are being urged to attend and provide councillors with input before the vote is called, but they must notify the clerk beforehand of their intention to speak at the meeting. Council’s decision will become the city’s formal position at the upcoming Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) hearing on the issue in January.

The Northwest Brampton Community Development Association (NWBCDA) will hold a meeting the following night at Loafer’s Lake Recreation Centre where residents will be updated on what happens next. That meeting will start at 7 p.m.

The developer has filed an appeal to the OMB and a hearing has been set for Jan. 12. Six weeks have been set aside to hear arguments and, as it stands now, the OMB will make the final decision on the application. The city and the region are parties to the hearing and the NWBCDA has been granted participant status.

City councillors are expected to agree with staff and reject the application. Mayor Susan Fennell and area councillors John Hutton and Paul Palleschi are already on record opposing the six tower complex that would include the tallest building in Brampton at 32 storeys high.

Royalcliff Developments Inc. and Lake Path Holdings Inc. want to build a total of 1,443 residential units on the site, abutting the Loafer’s Lake Recreation Centre at Sandalwood Parkway and Conestoga Drive. The majority of those units- 1,396- would be in six highrise towers between 18 and 32 storeys in height. Construction would be phased-in over 12 to 15 years, with the proposed name The Residence of Heart Lake Town Centre. It would bring an estimated 2,189 new residents and 353 visitors to the area, according to a citizen’s task force formed by the NWBCDA.

The site is already zoned to allow construction of two 18-storey buildings, or 419 units, and a 2,787 square metre (30,000 square foot) office building.
Despite being notified of staff’s conclusions, the developer has not revised the proposal.
In the staff report, which is available to the public today, city planners did not comment on any possible variations or scaled-down versions of the current proposal, giving no indication how large or how small of a development would be considered acceptable.

Instead, city staff reserved comment until revisions— if any— are presented and a full review of any alternate proposals can be done.

NWBCDA Co-chair Ken Bokor has said residents expect some type of compromise development would be deemed acceptable for the site, but many are still concerned about the scale of a compromise and the affect it could have on the area. Their concerns focus on traffic, schools, the environment, and other issues.
In the city’s staff report, planners concluded the proposal as submitted:
• is too large within the context of the Heart Lake Town Centre because it does not reasonably represent what could be expected today in terms of scale, function and necessary attributes of what was originally planned and approved for the site;
• has a density that far exceeds the maximum allowed in the city’s Official Plan for development outside Brampton’s central corridor;
• is inconsistent with the province’s growth plan because it is not in any of the areas pinpointed for intensification by that plan;
• would create traffic that will exceed the capacity of existing and planned roads and intersections in the area;
• does not offer enough parkland;
• includes an inappropriate mixture of low-rise townhouses with outdoor amenity areas which would be overshadowed by high-rise apartment buildings;
• there is missing technical information in the application related to floodplain mapping. The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority recommends a 10 m buffer;
• the application does not provide enough information to confirm the necessary storm sewer capacity.

The developers are asking for an Official Plan amendment and a rezoning on the land. The application was formally submitted to the city in February 2007, although its pending submission had been the subject of discussions among residents several months before.

For more information, contact Dana Jenkins or Paul Snape in the city’s Planning, Design and Development Department at 905-874-2050. Anyone interested in speaking at the meeting should contact the clerk’s office at 905-874-2106 or cityclerksoffice@brampton.ca.
For more information about the NWBCDA meeting or to contact the task force, visit http://nwbcda.googlepages.com.