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Hydro line alters plan for core highrise

Sale price of land on Assiniboine will be reduced, design changed

By: Bartley Kives

21/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 15

The property on Assiniboine Avenue that will be the future home of an apartment building, to be at a reduced land price.

TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Enlarge Image

The property on Assiniboine Avenue that will be the future home of an apartment building, to be at a reduced land price.

A plot of riverfront land has proven to be a little too electrifying for the developer hoping to build downtown Winnipeg's first highrise apartment tower in more than 20 years.

Rubin Spletzer, who was convinced to walk away from a deal to build apartments next to Upper Fort Garry in 2008, has discovered a 66-kilovolt hydro line running straight through the Assiniboine Avenue property he purchased this year in a second attempt to build a downtown highrise tower.

On Monday, city council's downtown development committee will meet behind closed doors to amend the sale of city-owned land to Spletzer's Heritage Landing Inc., which purchased the property east of Donald Street for $1.8 million.

According to city documents, the sale price will be reduced by $200,000 to $1.6 million to offset legal, accounting, architectural, engineering and other costs Spletzer incurred as the result of the discovery of the live hydro line, which runs through the riverside property and then below the Assiniboine River.

"The existence of the hydro line was unknown at the time of sale, as no caveat appears on the property," city real estate officials write in a report. "The hydro distribution line was installed by the former Winnipeg Hydro and therefore a caveat against the title would not be permitted by the Land Titles Office."

The city sold Winnipeg Hydro to Manitoba Hydro in 2002.

The real estate officials go on to say Spletzer's company would not have offered to buy the land "had it known the property contained a major hydro distribution line." But Heritage Landing still intends to proceed with its plan to build an apartment building, albeit with a brand-new design.

"The purchaser... is committed to downtown housing development and has altered its project to accommodate the existence of the hydro distribution line within the property," city officials write.

The city has also agreed to spend $400,000 to shore up the line within the property. The cost of moving the line is estimated at $2.5 million to $3 million, according to the report.

Spletzer could not be reached for comment, and city officials are not permitted to speak about the deal before it is concluded. But the discovery of the hydro line is only the latest setback in Spletzer's quest to build an apartment tower in downtown Winnipeg.

In 2007, the city agreed to sell Spletzer's Crystal Developers surplus land at the southwest corner of Fort Street and Assiniboine Avenue, choosing the apartment tower plan over an even taller highrise and a proposed heritage park at the site of Upper Fort Garry, the city's birthplace.

But an intense lobbying effort by the Friends of Upper Fort Garry convinced Spletzer to abandon the deal in early 2008. Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz said he did not offer Spletzer anything to back away from the deal, as the riverfront land on Assiniboine Avenue land was not declared surplus until November of that year.

Along with a live hydro line, the land in question includes the former home of Winnipeg's Board of Revision, along with an accessory building, a surface parking lot and a ribbon of green space.

In June, Spletzer hoped to build an apartment tower up to 25 storeys high, with as many as 180 units. The city has a shortage of rental units, as residential apartment vacancy hovers around one per cent.

 

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 21, 2009 A4

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15 Commentscomment icon

Winnipeg has SO much land downtown that could be used for apartment development. Downtown Winnipeg has six times the parking of central Edmonton and Calgary combined; if you walk through the city in the middle of the day, you'll see that half the parking lots are empty, and a lot of that land is municipally owned. Why not offer the developer a trade? That way he isn't faced with having to build around a hydro conduit he didn't budget for - and if there's a hydro conduit under the property that nobody knew about, what else is he going to find? Al Capone's secret lair?

What has changed since i left winnipeg? Nothing! Developers always get their way.Look at the eysore gas bar next to upper Fort Garry.And that was built in the mid 70's.Most cities let developers have their way.Damn the consequences later!
Les

The legislature employees surface parking lots on Kennedy and Edmonton could accommodate several apartment buildings.
The government says they support less cars and people taking more public transport, how about them taking the bus?

@Bartley Kives:

Broadway-Assiniboine, if it is to be a vital and successful neighbourhood, should showcase its primary asset: the river. It is the place where the urban and natural environments meet. Why would anyone want to hide the Assiniboine behind an apartment tower? Assiniboine Avenue by the Legislative Building is a beautiful parkway, but it quickly turns into a pretty drab street.

There will be public access, yes, but the long-term potential of a prime public space will be given over to private purposes. That this parcel was declared "surplus" is simply astounding.

What else is on the "surplus" list? I shudder to think what other strategically important parcels are about to be sold off on an ad hoc basis by short-sighted city officials.

Srewjob is right. This guy is getting the royal once over from this town. Winnipeg Hydro? That's the excuse? Gimme a break. This guy is still willing to build there? Hmmmm......

@smarterthanyou - LOL! oh god that's a good one!

The first crucial point is that a 66kV underground line will inevitably cause "flux density", which is a magnetic field readily measurable in Gauss-units. The second crucial point is that prime land is never vacant without a good reason, however arcane that reason might be.

Please, please tell me that the developer, and the City's own personnel, were not so negligent that they failed to conduct a test so elementary and intuitively necessary as the ground-level intensity of subterranean Gauss-units. The completion of this sort of test should immediately have raised the proverbial red flags and caused a stampede towards Plan B (whatever that might have been).

Oh, but I guess the test is not so elementary and intuitive, after all! Otherwise, why would I be reading about this sorry misadventure?

@Imagine: As previously reported, the plan for this proposed tower calls for continued public access to the river.

Bartley Kives

I find it amazing that even though there was not a caveat against the property because it was once city property and Winnipeg Hydro owned it that the city would not check out what was on the property. They have all the records even if a caveat was not filed. The left hand should know what the right one was doing. How many more surprises will Manitoba Hydro have of improperly registered or unregistered underground plant they inherited? No doubt there will be a lot of searching going on at this very moment.

The city is making a terrible, terrible decision that will haunt Winnipegers for decades to come. They should indeed refund the developer's money and find another parcel for them.

Just look at the picture above: It shows a park.

Look at "Assiniboine Ave & Navy Way" on Google Maps, and you'll find that the mapmakers have more vision than city decision-makers, because the map shows park land extending continuously from Donald St. to the Forks and beyond. Note, too, that there is a riverside park beside the Legislative Building; there is also an adjoining empty parcel at Assiniboine Ave. and Kennedy St.

What the city should be doing is gradually building a continuous riverside park from the Forks to the Leg. It would be a sparkling downtown amenity that could drive further development of the adjoining, largely undervalued Broadway-Assiniboine neighbourhood, which is perfectly located yet suffers from a certain dowdiness. Imagine it with a view of the river, and with bike paths that do not compete with cars and walking paths that do not flood. It would be transformed.

The city should buy up riverside parcels in this area over time, as they become available. They should not be selling them cheaply to developers, who already have their choice of any number of vacant lots downtown! Downtown needs more apartments, definitely -- but this is most certainly the wrong place to put them.

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