Olga Knight and Tom Sindlinger
Pledge asks civic politicians to seek permission of neighbourhood organizaitons
A small group of Calgarians are cultivating support for an initiative to elect aldermen who will pledge to protect the interests of communities before the interests of developers.
The Communities First concept emerged in 2010 when proposals to build 1400 homes on the Shawnee Slopes golf course in south Calgary were first presented and quickly opposed by adjacent communities that said they were never consulted.
At that time Olga Knight a former Mount Royal University instructor who ran against Ald. Brian Pincott in the 2010 municipal election on a platform focusing on community-level interests was approached by fellow activists to formulate Communities First and lobby council to mandate deeper community consultation on development applications. Knight is now the group’s primary representative. She and former PC MLA Tom Sindlinger are working to build the group’s membership and make the Communities First pledge a campaign issue for the 2013 city election slated for October 21.
She and Sindlinger say that community approval for major development projects must become an election issue because the current city council has only “paid lip service” to the concept of public consultation.
In addition to the unresolved details around Shawnee Slopes community associations are currently contesting major projects in Connaught Britannia and University Heights.
Peter Khu president of the University Heights Community Association says he supports what Communities First is trying to do. He is in the middle of a seven-year battle to scale down Western Securities’ plan to redevelop the Stadium Mall at the intersection of 16th Avenue and Uxbridge Drive N.W.
The existing strip mall is 64000 square feet of shops and restaurants built in the 1960s but Khu says the new proposal is for an 800000-square-foot mix of offices retail and a 200-room hotel. Overall the new development would be 12 times larger than the strip mall and comparable in size to Market Mall.
“We really do want development. That’s a tired old mall” says Khu. He says the problem is the proposal is vastly out of proportion with the rest of the neighbourhood and will require 12 publicly funded infrastructure upgrades to accommodate increased traffic to the area.
“To put that in that site means that it’s going to look like a mini-downtown” Khu says. Western Securities’ original 2006 proposal was to build a 270000-square-foot shopping centre. The city rejected that initial application because of traffic concerns.
Khu says the city now supports a centre three times larger than the 2006 version because municipal planning philosophies have changed dramatically.
“Everything [now] is about densification of the urban core.” He says he doesn’t oppose the philosophy but that this project would burden a small residential area and only really benefit the developer.
Knight and Sindlinger say few oppose the concept of densification but communities deserve an opportunity to negotiate which developments are green-lighted especially large-scale projects that require rezoning.
“We’re not confrontational. It’s not them or us” she insists. Communities “just don’t want to be overrun and then have no say.”
“All that council has to do is pass a resolution or motion that says ‘we will not consider any application for redevelopment unless it is signed by this community’” says Sindlinger. He doesn’t believe the current council will make that commitment.
“By their actions over the last three years we can see that they’re not willing to consider something like this” he says. “[Communities First will] do a scorecard [of] the last three years. The scorecard being the number of times these issues have come up before council and for each of these issues how many times did the vote go for communities and how many times did the vote go for developers.”
Knight and Sindlinger say attempts by the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Home Builders Association to ensure aldermanic candidates supportive of developers’ interests are elected in October indicate the relationship between communities developers and the city is “broken.”
They say Communities First will work openly to have community-supportive candidates elected instead but not necessarily in opposition to developers’ interests.
Sindlinger says Communities First wants candidates to sign a pledge promising that “‘if elected our first act will be to support this motion.’ That’s the kind of commitment we want from candidates…. With a simple commitment like that we will give them as much support as we possibly can.”
“We want community-approved development” explains Knight. “The community the developer and the city [should] work together to come up with the best development for this area so that we can add to the city’s density so we can ensure the developer makes a profit and we don’t run over the community in the way of its integrity and its character et cetera. So we’re looking at just the balance and a recognition that that balance needs to work.”
