A plan to build a downtown concert hall has been changed to a new building with less public space and fewer parking spaces than the previous plan, according to a City of Ottawa report.
The original proposal by Morguard Investments Ltd. for the development at 150 Elgin St./31 Gloucester St. was a mixed-use building with a planned 900-seat concert hall, office space, residential units and an underground parking garage. The new proposal is for a commercial complex and office tower, the report says.
The city, which sold the property to Morguard for $6.6 million in December 2005, was subject to a development agreement with design plans that included details on the amount of “community accessible/public space.” The public space lost in the new plan is “significant,” according to the report.
The redesigned project will contain a 23-storey building with a “pocket park” on Elgin and a seventh-floor roof terrace as public spaces. A fourth-floor terrace in the original plan was changed to office space, according to the report. The “interior public benefit space” was cut from 15,674 square feet to an 8,070-square-foot ground-floor winter garden.
Morguard says it is willing to lease about 6,000 square feet in the office tower for “an appropriate use that supports city programs at a reduced rate over a transitional period,” or provide about 4,000 square feet of additional “higher-value” finished space on the ground floor that could be “programmed and rented for a short-term use by non-profit groups,” the report says.
The redesigned project will not contain the 121 short-term parking spaces on upper floors of a parking garage for 24 hours a day at city downtown rates. Instead, it will provide at least 35 spaces from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 135 spaces from 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. on weekdays and all day on weekends.
According to the report, changing the agreement will allow the new project to go ahead and offer financial benefits to the city in the form of property taxes and development charges from the extra office space.
The original plan also contained $276,000 in tipping fees and $1.3 million in development charges and building permit fees. Morguard said it will cover the tipping fees, while the development charges no longer apply.
Morguard plans to rent out part of the proposed building to the Canada Council for the Arts, with a tenancy starting Jan. 1, 2014.
The city must agree to the changes or the planned arrangement will not go ahead, the report says.
The city manager “must clearly demonstrate the overall benefit to the city in making amendments to the agreements,” it says.