Restaurant owner vows to continue parking-lot battle

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This article was published 21/09/2023 (802 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An iconic Winnipeg restaurant has taken the oven gloves off in a legal battle to stop a Starbucks from being built on part of a grocery store parking lot it has used for decades.

Niata Enterprises, owner of the 62-year-old Thunderbird Restaurant at McPhillips Street and Jefferson Avenue, has filed court action demanding the city turn over all of its records related to the plans and approvals given decades ago for the restaurant and parking lot variances and, if they can’t be located, to explain why they are unavailable and to do everything it can to fix the records.

Niata owner Peter Ginakes and his lawyer, Dave Hill, unsuccessfully asked city council’s executive policy committee on Thursday to delay holding an appeal hearing for the owners of the neighbouring property at 920 Jefferson Ave.

EPC rejected that request and, after holding a hearing, voted unanimously to uphold the appeal and declare the Starbucks could be built next door to the Thunderbird.

Hill said after the meeting the matter is not over.

“We’re still going to court with this,” he said.

Later, Mayor Scott Gillingham said he voted in favour of the development because the city’s civil service recommended it and because the dispute had already been taken before Court of King’s Bench and the Manitoba Court of Appeal, where the Thunderbird owners lost their case.

“I want a ‘yes first’ culture here at the City of Winnipeg,” Gillingham said.

“It has been a long process that this application has taken. … The public service recommended the plan approval, I looked at it, read it, I’m aware of the public-service recommendation and (with) everything I heard, I believe it is a development which should proceed.”

Regarding any possible lawsuit against the city, for allegedly losing records which would show there was a decades-old agreement by the former municipality of Old Kildonan — which later became part of the City of Winnipeg — allowing the restaurant’s customers to park in the grocery store’s parking lot, Gillingham said, “We’ll have to deal with it when it comes. … It’s too soon to tell what the specifics are on that.”

Ginakes said the city claimed it had no record of any agreements allowing the restaurant’s use of the parking lot, and also provided the wrong drawings of where the restaurant was situated on the lot and the building’s size, which contributed to the loss of his court case.

“Now it comes back, and you think you have no liability?” he said. “It’s a series of sad events, all because the city didn’t have proper records. It’s bureaucratic bungling at its worst.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca