City council Wednesday voted unanimously to cancel an encroachment fee waiver agreement with the owner of Somerset House after years of his refusal to renovate the dilapidated building.
Council approved a reconstruction design for Somerset House in December 2013. They have voted twice to waive encroachment fees, totaling $43,000 as of August 2014.
Watson said he doesn’t end the deal with “any great delight,” but adds Tony Shahrasebi, the owner of Somerset House, will no longer be getting a “free ride” for encroaching on public property.
“I’ve heard excuse after excuse. Nothing’s happened. I go by that building quite frequently, and it’s an eyesore, it’s an embarrassment,” Watson said at the committee meeting.
“The building continues to deteriorate, and I think the public have waited long enough for the building to actually return to what I think would be a thing of beauty for that end of Somerset.”
Somerset House is a heritage building located at 352 Somerset St. W. In October 2007, construction workers knocked out a key support in the basement of the building during “illegal construction activities,” according to Watson’s motion. Part of the southeast wall collapsed, trapping a construction worker in the rubble for two hours and forcing the police to close the four surrounding city blocks for two months.
The incident led to a messy legal battle then between the city and Shahrasebi that not settled until December 2012. Shahrasebi agreed to pay the city $650,000 in policing and firefighting costs and to end a $5-million countersuit and the city waived additional encroachment fees for block the sidewalk on Somerset Street.
Somerset Ward Coun. Diane Holmes told council Shahrasebi does not have a tenant secured and is looking at his other businesses trying to find the capital to start renovations.
She says the encroachment fees are a small amount of money compared to the cost of renovations at Somerset House, but Watson’s motion “is driving home the point that we are out of patience.”
Shahrasebi did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to terminating the waiver of encroachment fees, the committee passed a motion directing the mayor to lobby for municipalities to be granted “sufficient legislative authority to ensure heritage property owners redevelop and preserve heritage buildings in a timely manner.”
Watson said a number of landlords and landowners from different parts of the city are, like Shahrasebi, not living up to their civic responsibility.
“We need to do whatever we can to work with provincial bodies so that these kinds of buildings are not allowed to deteriorate to the point where a developer or builder then comes and says, ‘This is beyond repair, we have to tear it down,” Watson said at the committee meeting.
Rideau-Rockcliffe Coun. Peter Clark says he fully supports Watson’s initiative.
“I think this should be a sign, for this council and for the next one, that the heritage rules need to be strengthened ”
“It concerns me that this has gone on for this long.”
Jeff Morrison, former president of the Centretown Community Health Centre, started a petition in October 2012 calling on Shahrasebi and the city to resolve their issues and renovate the building.
He says he hopes the province will grant the city the legislative tools it needs to ensure heritage properties are preserved as a source of pride rather than embarrassment.