UPDATE: Ottawa city council approved the zoning change and Official Plan change related to 10 Oblats Ave. on July 10, 2019. Fourteen councillors voted in favour of the application; nine voted against.
Despite fervent opposition from Old Ottawa East residents, the city’s planning committee on Thursday approved an application from the developer of Greystone Village to increase the height of a residential and commercial building, located near a former monastery, from six to nine storeys.
Greystone Village is a 26-acre mixed-use development project between Main Street and the Rideau River, centred around the Edifice Deschâtelets Scholasticate Monastery. The proposed nine-storey, 120-unit building at 10 Oblats Ave. would border the walkway to the heritage building.
Councillors on the planning committee voted 8-1 in favour of the height increase after nearly four hours of presentations and debate in a city hall room packed with dozens of Old Ottawa East residents who want the building to remain six-storeys high.
“This building will not significantly change the density but it will destroy our plan,” Lorna Kingston said, referring to the development blueprint for Old Ottawa East.
Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper was the sole councillor who dissented on the application. The proposal still needs approval from Ottawa city council, who has already green-lit a sister six-storey building adjacent to 10 Oblats Ave.
City of Ottawa planning staff backed The Regional Group’s application to make 10 Oblats Ave. taller, saying the additional three stories wouldn’t have any “undue adverse impact” on the surrounding community. They also noted several alterations to the building’s design have been made since its first iteration, including setbacks above the sixth floor, inset balconies and removed balconies on upper stories.
But that didn’t appease residents, who argued the building would both tower over the five-storey Deschâtelets building and detract from its heritage features and the Grande Allée leading up to it.
“I think if you have one of these buildings pop it, it just draws your eye away,” Old Ottawa East resident Jeff O’Neill told councillors.
Barry Hobin, the architect behind Greystone’s master plan, insisted the nine-storey design was made with the Grande Allée’s importance in mind. What the height change is doing is transferring area and density to the top of the building in order to set the development further back from the trees lining the walkway, he said.
“The ground floor public experience is still strong… or stronger,” Hobin argued, adding the proposed apartment block is “a football field” away from the Deschâtelets building.
Many of the 18 residents who addressed the committee on Thursday said The Regional Group has worked well with the community over the last five years but called the company’s application for nine storeys at this point in the process “the squandering of good will.”
“This makes me sick,” Paul Goodkey said. “I’m just really, really, really disappointed that we’ve gone from an approved concept, having two buildings on this property, six-storeys high … and now we have a nine-storey building where it shouldn’t be.”
“We believed what we saw in the presentation centre, which was six storeys,” Kingston said. “What happened to this co-operation with the community and the community plan?”
Applicant, residents disagree over height limit in community blueprint
Residents argued that the proposed height increase contravenes a six-storey limit outlined for that piece of land in the secondary plan for Old Ottawa East. Resident Heather Jarrett described that planning document as “a three-way compromise” between the landowner, city staff and the community that was negotiated over several years and approved in 2011.
Representatives for The Regional Group, however, claimed that design plan does allow for nine storeys.
City staff, for their part, argued the policy is unclear because it references both six- and nine-storey height limits but is “silent on height references to the mixed-use medium-rise designation.” The city’s legal department is of the same view, but told councillors its opinion and interpretation of the current language is that it sets out a six-storey maximum.
Residents — most of whom were wearing bright green shirts bearing the phrase “respect approved plans” — rejected the suggestion that the document’s language is ambiguous.
“There was no ambiguity whatsoever in the Old Ottawa East Secondary Plan,” John Dance said. “A six-storey maximum is what all parties supported. You can’t come along 10 years later and say ‘Oh we didn’t mean that.'”
Hobin, for Greystone’s part, insisted that their proposal for a nine-storey building on Oblats Avenue is not an eleventh-hour change and that the idea had been discussed for some time.
“This is not something that came up yesterday,” he said.
If councillors “so easily” change approved design plans, it will be hard to convince Ottawa residents moving forward that their input about their neighbourhood’s future is valued, area councillor Shawn Menard argued. Menard, the councillor for Capital Ward, doesn’t sit on planning committee and didn’t get a vote on Thursday.
In voting in favour of the building’s height increase, the committee simultaneously carried a staff-recommended amendment to clear up the so-called ambiguity in the Official Plan. That amendment would update the wording to “permit a range of buildings between three and nine storeys in the mixed-use medium-rise designation within Greystone Village.”