27 storey highrise on Barnard Avenue approved by stealth

I am very disturbed by Kelowna City Council’s recent decision to approve the application for a 27 storey building (a 12 storey height addition on top of 15 storeys that were already allowable under the existing zoning) at the site owned by Aquilini Development on the 400 block of Bernard Avenue. It is preposterous to treat a proposal to increase the height of a building by 77 percent as a routine application for a height variance as if it was only an additional one or two storeys being requested, yet that is precisely what was done in this case.  What the developer did here was make an end run around the present Zoning Bylaw and Downtown Plan, and a complicit city planning department, Advisory Planning Commission, and city council let him do exactly that instead of requiring that changes be made to those two planning documents with the full consultation of the public. How easy it is to get your way if you are a developer in Kelowna, especially if you have greased the palm of several city councillors by contributing to their election campaigns!

 

By caving into this developer, our city council has managed to significantly change the character of the downtown in much the same way as the Downtown CD Zone (21) would have done by setting a new standard for building heights which every developer from here on in will be demanding for their own projects there. No less important than the CD Zone because of its character-changing impact, the Aquilini proposal in contrast hardly received any public scrutiny or opportunity for public comment. That the item was on the agenda at the April 7 city council meeting was unadvertised and unbeknownst to all except those who regularly read the agendas for future city council meetings on the city’s website. I would venture to guess that 99.9% of the public were thus unaware that they had the opportunity to address city council on this important application that evening.

 

Compounding the egregious nature of the offense was the way the meeting was conducted. With a full agenda and the Aquilini application being the next to last item, city council did not begin to hear presentations on that item until around midnight. Council had an option to adjourn the meeting at 11:00pm considering the lateness of the hour, but Councillor Charlie Hodge moved that council press on. After all, there were still development applications to approve and no one on council wanted to stand in the way of “progress” even if it meant that the public gallery would be empty. Consequently, council approved a precedent setting and city character-changing development that the public was largely unaware was coming before them that evening and at an hour when nearly every member of the public was absent. But that is the way that city council conducts its business in Kelowna and, unfortunately, gets away with it.

Graeme James — Kelowna’s saviour of agricultural land

When Kelowna City Councillor Graeme James ran as a candidate last fall on the issue of protecting agricultural land in the city, I thought he was creating a false issue as there are adequate protections in place to preserve agricultural land, specifically the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). How surprised I was then to learn that at a recent city council meeting at his first opportunity to rule on whether to continue to protect some viable agricultural land in the case of the Stober property on Dilworth Mountain that Councillor James voted to recommend to the Agricultural Land Commission that this property be removed from the ALR. So instead of carrying out his election promise, James here favoured developing some of the agricultural land that he campaigned to protect.

But then I never took his election grandstanding concerning protecting agricultural land seriously, knowing James to be another anything-goes-development type in which he neatly fills the empty shoes of Carol Gran and joins like-minded councillors Andre Blanleil and Brian Given on council. It can be seriously questioned whether James who essentially bought his seat on city council having spent over $16,500 in his election bid, which was more than five times the average amount spent by councillor candidates, would have won otherwise. But now that he has gotten his foot in the door, he will likely enjoy a long career on council as Kelowna voters being a timid lot by nature don’t like to throw out incumbents no matter how bad their performance might be. It seems that the electorate prefers the devil that they know on council rather than take a chance on change, the only problem being that as a result they usually end up with a lot of devils.