Developer wants city, committee fined

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This article was published 25/10/2019 (1791 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A developer is arguing the city and the city centre community committee should be fined millions of dollars after failing to do anything for more than two months to address a judge’s finding of contempt.

In documents filed in Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, Andrew Marquess is asking Justice Candace Grammond to fine the city and the civic committee an initial $250,000, starting when the contempt order was handed down on Aug. 6, and ratchet up that fine by $37,500 each day until the city is no longer in contempt.

That means the potential total fine is $3.25 million as of today, and growing daily.

Lawyer Dave Hill, who represents Marquess and proposed the fines, said the city had done nothing in the weeks since the judge’s contempt order was issued, until last week when it filed court documents asking for the judge to reverse her decision.

“To say my client is disappointed would be an understatement,” Hill said on Friday. “It is disappointing. Very disappointing. It is two months later and they’ve done nothing.”

Hill said that since the contempt order was issued, the civic city centre community committee — made up of city councillors John Orlikow, Cindy Gilroy and Sherri Rollins — has held meetings, but done nothing at a public meeting to consider the secondary plan for the Fulton Grove project on the Parker Lands property, as the judge ordered them to do.

The judge had also ordered the city to scrap the committee’s decision from last November, when it unanimously agreed with an administrative recommendation to reject Marquess’s secondary plan for the 133-acre Parker Lands site because it wasn’t ready for city council’s consideration.

“I do not accept that the respondents (city and committee), on the whole, acted in good faith,” Grammond said in her 21-page decision last August, “or that they took reasonable steps to comply with the order.

“Accordingly, I will not exercise my discretion to avoid a finding of contempt.”

Hill said because the proposed sanctions are fines, the province, not his client, would benefit from it. But Hill said he is asking the judge to order the city to pay Marquess’s legal costs.

Hill said the judge has put the whole matter over to Nov. 22.

Marquess has been fighting to develop the Fulton Grove project, located in the Parker Lands site on the north side of the city’s southwest rapid transit corridor section, which links the Jubilee Avenue-Pembina Avenue area to the University of Manitoba.

Hill said Marquess plans to build highrise residential buildings on the site, but the city has said it wants buildings there that max out at four storeys.

“The city calls for rapid transit, and it talks about high-density housing beside it, but when there’s a plan to put in high-density housing, the city says it should be four storeys,” he said.

“(Marquess) is following the city’s own zoning… what they’re doing is totally contrary to their own guidelines to encourage rapid transit.

“So now, if you drive by the Parker Lands, you’ll see the transit way is there and the stations are there, but there’s nothing beside it.”

Both Orlikow and the city say they can’t comment because the case is before the courts.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca