Thank you to the many people who registered to watch last night’s Open House presentation on the new Solmar/Two Sisters Rand Estate proposal.
To summarize, Mr. Marotta is back with a proposal that would see a massive hotel, some 85 feet high including architectural features, that would dwarf the adjacent Randwood House together with some 270 residential condominiums behind the hotel on a portion of the property zoned “low density” residential. The condominiums would be serviced by a new street on the 200 John St panhandle, a street the OLT in its October, 2024 decision said was unapprovable with a direction to look elsewhere for access.
To say this proposal is an outrage does not do it justice. Here are some of the other things we heard last night:
- The whole thing is being marketed to the Town as a Ritz Carlton affiliated project (but owned by Solmar). However the lead planner on the file for Solmar has never seen any written agreement with Marriott (the owner of the Ritz brand). He is just taking Benny Marotta’s word for it.
- That this would be by residential unit numbers the fifth largest such Ritz project in the world. On the most important heritage estate lot in NOTL.
- That rather than seriously looking for access to the subdivision elsewhere, as directed by the OLT, Solmar carried out a cursory examination of alternatives and landed, to no one’s surprise, back where Mr. Marotta has been doggedly attempting for 9 years to put a street – on the 200 John panhandle. We also learned that zero consideration was given to an access off East West Line through property owned by Mr. Marotta.
- That the Fire Chief ostensibly signed off on a single access for 270 condominium units based simply on the fact that the buildings would be sprinklered.
- That in spite of the express direction of the OLT that a Tree Preservation Plan be done before any new development proposal is advanced and that that Plan should “inform the development” no such Plan was in fact done before the application was deemed complete by Town staff, and that the work to develop such a Plan is only being done now, well after the development concept was developed and submitted to the Town
- That in the event of a malfunction of the proposed on-site sewer system, raw sewage would be discharged to a small creek running behind Weatherstone and Christopher.
Several SORE experts and representatives will be delegating in person to Council concerning this proposal at the Public Meeting next Tuesday evening. We can only hope that Council shares our view that this is a complete abuse of process and provides appropriate direction to staff so that Mr. Marotta can be sent back to the drawing board again. We know he will not take this to the OLT given its 2024 Decision.
NOTE – We have asked Mr. Ruller, the Town CAO, to strongly consider moving the Public Meeting next Tuesday to the Community Centre. We fully expect many more people than the Council Chambers can accommodate to show up next week. At the Council meeting in April of 2023 to consider the heritage permits needed for Mr. Marotta’s previous subdivision application, hundreds of people showed up at the Community Centre. There was a standing room only overflow crowd of 500-600 people at the January 2018 Public Meeting on Mr. Marotta’s first hotel proposal. It serves no one’s interests to try to accommodate next Tuesday’s meeting in the Council Chambers in our view.