The City of Kelowna spent close to three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars coming up with a plan to transform the city's unremarkable downtown core into a glittering metropolis with 27-storey towers.
But then the city council voted 6-3 to scrap the controversial plan, a decision that was panned by its supporters while opponents celebrated.
"We are not happy with council's decision," said Kelowna Chamber of Commerce CEO Weldon LeBlanc. "This is not just a plan of council and not just a plan of the business community. We as a community - we're talking business and residents - have invested more than two years in terms of shaping and reshaping this plan through a whole series of public consultation meetings."
Critics were ecstatic, however, reflecting a range of views from those who regarded the plan as too complex to succeed to those who staunchly oppose high-rise development, warning against the "Vancouverization" of B.C.'s third largest city.
"This is exactly what we wanted," said John Zeger, chairman of Citizens for Responsible Community Planning. "We have a beautiful sky-scape that's created for us naturally with the mountains in the background. I don't want to see that obscured."
The plan, known as the CD-21 zone, was born in the spring of 2007, when Alberta-based Westcorp Properties Inc. gave the city $400,000 to kick-start a redevelopment plan for a four-block area around a downtown property it owns next to Okanagan Lake.
The contribution came with "no strings attached," and the city ended up spending an additional $350,000, said Kelowna's director of real estate and building services, Doug Gilchrist.
After several rounds of workshops, open houses, surveys and public hearings, city staff and their consultants came up with a complex plan that relied on developers buying up dozens of independently owned properties and consolidating them into nine sub-zones.
State-of-the-art high-rises up to 27 storeys were to be allowed in locations and according to criteria set out in the plan, with developers also required to provide $22-million worth of amenities, including a playground, affordable housing and a public pier.
Today the waterfront area is dominated by buildings of less than four storeys.
The plan was actually approved by the council of the day in October, 2008, but it sat in limbo for 14 months while it was vetted by the B.C. Ministry of Transportation. By the time the ministry gave its thumbs up, four new councillors had been elected and council voted to reopen the plan.
Three months later, it voted to kill the plan altogether.
"It's unfortunate and I think it's short-sighted," said Councillor Andre Blanleil, a 16-year council veteran who supported the plan to the very end. "I think we're settling for mediocrity."
Mr. Blanleil noted that over the years, the city has tried a host of measures to spur downtown redevelopment, from offering tax incentives to exempting new developments from parking charges, all to no avail.
"We went through the biggest growth in the last 10 years in Kelowna and didn't see a single building in that quadrant," he said, adding the plan's demise means the downtown is "not really going to see any major development, I think, for the next 10 years."
But as far as Kelowna Mayor Sharon Shepherd is concerned, abandoning the CD-21 zone could get things moving quicker. Ms. Shepherd voted against the plan both in 2008 and again last week.
"I'm just wanting some more instant action," she said, noting it could have taken 30 to 40 years for the plan to come to fruition.
She said the CD-21 zone's complexity made it difficult to tweak, because changes in one sub-zone would affect what was planned for the other sub-zones. What's more, she added, some of the area's current property owners were telling her they didn't want to go along with the plan.
"I'm trying to refocus … on how can we do some things that are more certain," Ms. Shepherd said.
However, the way the city handled the CD-21 zone could discourage developers from moving projects forward, according to Randy Shier, president of the Kelowna branch of the Urban Development Institute, an industry lobby group.
"Whenever you create uncertainty, investment dollars will go elsewhere," he said. "I think that's the unintended consequence of the action of turning it down. It's not simply let's start over and figure things out."
Special to The Globe and Mail