An overflow crowd packed the Council chambers and an overflow room last night for a statutory public meeting on the latest Marotta Rand proposal. In a meeting that lasted until 11 pm, Council heard from over 20 delegates, not a single one of whom supported the proposal. Several SORE experts addressed Council during the meeting.
Here’s what we heard:
- To our surprise, Town planning staff consulted with Solmar on the application before it was filed and among other things, the location of the proposed hotel was altered in response to input from the Town.
- Town planning staff did not seem to have a clear answer to the role that former Town heritage planner Denise Horne’s 2023 report, Council’s December 15, 2023 resolution or the October 2024 OLT decision would have on their evaluation.
- The proposed hotel doubles the footprint and is almost 3 times the height of the Romance Inn that Council narrowly approved in 2011 with a carefully worded Official Plan amendment.
- That the hotel and the five 3 storey residences as proposed would overwhelm Randwood’s significant cultural heritage landscape in the opinion of SORE’s urban design expert (the same expert the Town hired to do a peer review of the Romance Inn in 2011) and that it is inconsistent with the historic natural and cultural character of the Rand Estate.
- That the proposal does not conform to the Provincial Policy Statement, the Region’s Official Plan, the Town’s Official Plan or OPA 92 that resulted from a Special Study by Urban Strategies of the John St E Character Area that the Town spent $100K on in 2023/24.
- That the proposal directly contradicts the recommendations of the 850-page Denise Horne report in 2023 that Solmar be denied heritage permits for most of what it was proposing at that time, including a subdivision street on the 200 John panhandle. The recommendations from that report were accepted by Council in a special meeting attended by hundreds at the Community Centre in April of 2023.
- That the proposal would obliterate or denigrate most of the critical Dunnington-Grubb designed landscape features that Denise Horne recommended and the OLT agreed need to be protected and rehabilitated, including the sunken garden, the pool garden complex, the axial mound and walkway and the whistle stop, as well as the Carriage House, contrary to the assurances provided by Solmar planner Paul Lowes last night.
- Critically, from almost all of the delegations last night, that the proposal ignores and directly contradicts most of the explicit findings and direction from the Ontario Land Tribunal in its October 2024 Decision after an 8 week hearing in which the Town invested hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- That Town staff accepted the Solmar application as complete notwithstanding that a tree preservation plan, which the OLT directed was to “inform” what was possible on Randwood, had not been undertaken.
- That Town staff accepted the Solmar application as complete notwithstanding that the data on which the Environmental Impact Study supporting the application is based is stale-dated and no longer reliable.
- That Town staff accepted the Solmar application as complete notwithstanding that the traffic data on which its traffic assessment is based is from 2022 and no longer reliable.
- That the proposed 200 John panhandle subdivision street remains unsafe and unapprovable in the opinion of SORE’s traffic expert.
- That Solmar has not carried out a proper analysis of possible alternate accesses, including over land owned by sister company Two Sisters.
- That the proposal will or will almost certainly adversely affect boundary and border trees over which both the Town (tree 81) and the owners of Brunswick Place at 210 John have statutory and common law rights that approvals under the Planning and Heritage Acts do not trump.
- That the assessment of stormwater impacts of the proposal relied on incorrect assumptions and that even with these incorrect assumptions, there will be at least a 30% increase in stormwater flows to the John and Charlotte intersection, which already has a known serious flooding issue.
- That the proposed communal sewer system will likely require a Municipal Responsibility Agreement with the Ministry of Environment pursuant to which the Town assumes backstop liability and responsibility for the system.
- That the proposed communal sewer system in the event of malfunction would flow to an onsite stormwater pond for which it is not designed and from there to a tributary to One Mile Creek that flows behind the Christopher Court residences.
- That SORE’s experts are concerned there is no separate emergency access for fire and ambulances.
- That the parking study that supports the application is seriously flawed.
- That there are legitimate serious questions on whether this proposal will ever actually become a Ritz Carlton managed property and that there are no answers about what Plan B looks like in that event.
The totality of the submissions last night make it clear in our view that the Town is not properly resourced to grapple with this application without significant outside assistance of the sort that SORE has retained. We trust and assume that those experts are being retained. We also trust and assume that Solmar will be directed to update the data supporting its traffic and environmental impact assessments this summer and to provide a public report on how its tree preservation plan, once one is actually done, has “informed” the design or redesign of its proposal.
More fundamentally, some of the delegates last night told Council that this application was nothing less than an abuse of process. Solmar is back asking the Town for approval to do essentially the same things the OLT, standing in the shoes of Council, told it could not do less than two years ago. This Council has also told Solmar the same thing, by approving the Denise Horne report recommendations in April of 2023 and then in a resolution on December 15, 2023 that told Solmar the Town would only support a constraints-based approach to development at Randwood and that a 200 John panhandle street would not be supported. No amount of further study can or should obscure the fact that Solmar is back asking for things it has been told, clearly and unequivocally by Town staff, this Council and the OLT, it cannot have and cannot do. We are left with a feeling of bewilderment that some sanity cannot be brought to this process by which the Town can avoid devoting money and likely hundreds of hours of staff time only to arrive at what surely must be a foregone conclusion.