'Broken' tools and confusion all around in Winnipeg's planning department, developers say

If Winnipeg's property, planning and development department and the rules it follows were not a smouldering fire already, the controversy over the fate of the old mansion at 514 Wellington Cresc. seems to have added more gas to the blaze.

Last week, the city's property and planning committee halted plans to demolish the house to make way for a new development — the latest in a series of decisions that either mean the city is or most likely will be in court, and following a scandal that saw 20 staff in inspections fired, suspended or reprimanded.

"The property, planning and development department has had a spectacular year," the lawyer representing the owners of 514 Wellington said last week in front of the committee that oversees the department.

His ironic tone is being matched elsewhere, and that could mean change is coming to some of the ways Winnipeg gets to manage its business.

The province — with a freshly mandated Progressive Conservative government — seems to be in a mood to get its own hose out and start spraying legislative foam all over the city's ability to oversee its own planning.

There is no love lost between Premier Brian Pallister and Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman. The Pallister government appears in a mood over City of Winnipeg matters, including development fees (call them taxes if you wish) and funding skirmishes.

"It's given people the opportunity in some cases, perhaps, to vent," the premier said of the province's report this year on property development, "but let's now take a look at whether that venting is legitimate and there's something we can do about it."

Does that mean there's a fire extinguisher in provincial hands?

'Collateral damage' in heritage designation

Last Thursday, the committee overseeing property, planning and development turned down an appeal that saved the 110-year-old building at 514 Wellington from the wrecking ball.

The house itself was on a nomination list of buildings around the city for heritage protection until 2014, but it and another 134 homes were removed from the list, along with a couple hundred other structures.

Whatever your thoughts about the heritage status of that old house or the nomination of the neighbourhood for such a designation, planning and development did give the go-ahead to the owners of 514 Wellington to tear it down and build fresh. 

Their building and demolition permits were suspended, though, after a late-evening email last June told them the neighbourhood in which the massive old house sits had been nominated as a heritage conservation district.

That poured water on their plans for development on the lot.

Over seven hours of submissions were made last week at the planning and development committee, many opposed to the owners' desire to tear down the mansion.

One person who spoke, though, said little about tearing down the building. Instead, he said he and his company have become "collateral damage" in the effort to nominate Crescentwood as a heritage conservation district.

'Your tools are broken'

Tim Comack with Ventura Land Company owns three homes on Grosvenor Avenue, about five blocks from 514 Wellington. The company plans to tear down the houses and build up-market condos in their place.

Ventura's properties fall within the nominated heritage conservation district for Crescentwood, and he was in front of the committee to ask the boundaries be shifted.

The land, according to all the maps and legal descriptions, isn't in Crescentwood, but in the adjacent McMillan neighbourhood.

Comack and his company had been involved with eight years of city-led efforts to build a neighbourhood use and development plan for the whole Osborne–Corydon area.

The process was so long and in some ways so tortured, an entire version of the plan was scrapped and started over.

Comack says the plan — with deep dives into land use and building character, including heritage aspects and a focus on public consultations — was the guiding light for his company to buy the three homes on Grosvenor and redevelop.

"We bought these sites with the predictability provided by the city," Comack told the committee.

The developer was mostly complimentary of the property, planning and development department (as a man who applies for a lot of zoning and building permits might be) saying " we are, generally speaking, quite collaborative with PP and D."

However, he turned his own hose of frustration on the process — or processes that are not completely followed, interfered with, or are simple out of date.

"Your tools are broken," Comack told the committee.

Variances to permits stack up in front of city committees as land owners and users seek minor tweaks to old rules.

Comack says zoning bylaw changes proposed some time ago by the department should have been enacted to cut the number of variances.

That didn't happen.

The City of Winnipeg charter (legislated by the province) needs to be updated, he says, to allow fees and costs to be charged at the building permit stage — not collected and sorted through variances.

In Comack's mind, the heritage conservation district process has now become "weaponized," and there is confusion for everyone.

Infill is professed as a goal of many communities as they struggle to provide services to outlying suburbs, but Comack is becoming jaded by what he sees.

"This experience for me as a developer … why would we do infill?" he told the councillors.

Heritage Winnipeg critical too

As far as Cindy Tugwell is concerned, the demolition of 514 Wellington Cresc. would have been a moot point and the current owners would have saved themselves a small fortune — if the city had remained consistent with its own rules.

The house had been on a list of nominated properties for heritage status, but a 2014 bylaw change took 314 buildings off the inventory.

Heritage Winnipeg hired a lawyer and sent the city a letter asking for the legal reasons for scrapping the nomination list.

Three–and–a–half years later, there has been no response to Heritage Winnipeg from the director of the property department.

Tugwell believes if proper procedures had been followed the old mansion would have had some sort of designation — which anyone who'd want to buy the place would have known — and the city would never have issued a demolition permit for it in the first place.

Heritage conservation can be divisive as property owners fight rules that could make their buildings more expensive to own and interested parties fight to preserve ever more fragile snippets of the past.

Land use and zoning is complicated and there's all sorts of jockeying around the city by the development community.

Accepting that the city's role is to protect its citizens and create an environment where the economy can grow along with the population, it's up to the mayor and his councillors to guard the rules that are worthy and change the rules that are not.

If there isn't enough effort made on the latter, city politicians may find the province doing it for them.