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Posted May 20, 2016, 3:59 AM
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Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Windsor, On.
Posts: 1,862
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That proposed high end night club on Ouellette
Do you remember that night club proposal for the hole on Ouellette Ave?
Here's an interesting article with some up to date information on what happened.
source: http://windsorstar.com/news/local-ne...stment-critics
Quote:
It was a multimillion-dollar Windsor development proposal that was different and unique in a downtown struggling to attract private investment.
Designed to cater to a high-end crowd, the multi-storey restaurant-bar-nightclub would boast a rooftop lounge, jutting patios overlooking Ouellette Avenue and a catwalk accessing the city-owned parking garage at Pelissier and Park.
A city committee and then council in 2014 enthusiastically approved the proposal that would see the transformation of a gaping vacant hole where a suspected arsonist had torched the Drunkin’ Burrito in 2011.
And then nothing. More than five years after the fire, the lot at 415 Ouellette Ave., along Windsor’s main commercial drag, is still strewn with weeds.
“We thought we had the city behind us — and we didn’t,” said Glen Muir, a local realtor and investment company owner.
The owners, successful Windsor businessmen who were looking at their first downtown foray, feel they got burned, and they blame city hall.
Muir’s partner Jack Jorgensen, a property investor and owner of Advance Business Systems, said they thought they’d done everything right, speaking to the politicians in advance, and meeting with area businesses and residents ahead of formally approaching the city for approval.
“Without question, it was original, it was outside-the-box thinking,” Muir said of the design. Different for Windsor, perhaps, but nothing, he added, that hasn’t been built in vibrant downtowns elsewhere (think New Orleans).
What killed the dream, they said, after two years of planning, a $300,000 investment in land, architectural and engineering drawings and city hall’s initial green light, was a legal requirement that the owners enter into an encroachment agreement with the municipality. Jorgensen said the go-ahead was contingent on agreeing that the city — for any reason, at any point in the future — could demand that the overhangs and/or walkway be removed on 90 days’ notice.
Those elements, said Muir, were what made the development unique, and removing them could cost as much as installing them. Such an agreement, the partners said, would put the future of the project at the unacceptable whim of a bureaucrat or council reacting, for example, to a neighbour’s noise complaint.
“In Windsor, we have a tendency to make life miserable for small business,” mused Alfie Morgan, professor emeritus of business at the University of Windsor.
Morgan, who once headed a small business task force that advised city council, said other cities recognize the importance of that sector in turning local economies around and are “doing things a lot better than we are here.”
When it comes to red-tape horror stories, not every business proponent gets such close coddling by city hall as Markham developer Henry Tam, who hasn’t been shy about knocking on the mayor’s door or going to the media with complaints about local bureaucracy stifling his plans for a recently acquired Chatham Street property.
One local business owner said he got so frustrated with his city hall experience, while expanding his Windsor operations, that he vowed to never do it again. He’s now moved on to start small enterprises in other cities.
As with a number of other small business operators with similar stories contacted by the Windsor Star, that business owner refused to be identified, saying he still has to work with city officials.
“I don’t need any headaches,” said the business owner, adding he had to wait months to open as permits and architectural, engineering and other plans and blueprints wound their way through the approvals process across multiple desks at several municipal offices.
“You’re not building a rocket ship … each of these things require money, and people are waiting to work,” he said, recalling numerous phone calls trying to find out why and where things were being held up.
“There’s no sense of urgency — as a business person, you have to be efficient or you go broke,” he said. “I won’t repeat that experience,” he added.
Morgan said others in Windsor’s small business community would express the same frustrations, but “they’re afraid of city hall and that if they speak out, the bureaucrats will go after them.”
Thom Hunt, the city’s executive director of building and planning services, said his department is “open to change” and wants to get feedback on its service. He said the spirit of a recent survey of the local business and development community was to gauge “the good, the bad and the ugly.”
Morgan and Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Area chairman Larry Horwitz said those with great ideas to start or expand a small business face enough challenges and hurdles without also having to figure out on their own how to navigate through the planning, building and other approval processes at city hall.
“There’s nobody there to guide you through,” said Horwitz. “A big, big thing harming business is red tape and bureaucracy, especially when it comes to opening a business,” he added.
While employing more diplomatic language, spokesmen for both the local chamber of commerce — the voice of the business community — and the local economic development corporation — the publicly funded agency responsible for retaining, expanding, attracting and helping start up new businesses — agree that city hall should do more.
“We need to do better … we have to find ways to make it easier, faster and cheaper,” said WindsorEssex Economic Development Corporation interim CEO Rakesh Naidu. He’s quick to add, however, that he doesn’t think red tape in Windsor is any worse than in other Ontario cities.
“There’s no magic elixir here … (but) at the same time, it would be nice if there was a single entity you could call, a one-stop shop at city hall,” said Matt Marchand, president and CEO of the Windsor-Essex Regional Chamber of Commerce. “It’s fair to say we want to improve efficiencies,” he added.
Conceding there are still “barriers to be removed,” Mayor Drew Dilkens insists city hall is moving in that direction and doing so with “a strong sense of urgency.”
Dilkens said a new economic development officer is being hired who, by June, will be located “directly outside my office” and be deployed to handle any troubleshooting or to proactively assist those who could use extra city hall help for plans setting up or expanding local business.
“Someone like that (within the city hall bureaucracy) championing City of Windsor development — we haven’t had a person like that,” said Dilkens.
While there’s “no better place” than the mayor’s office for getting help to get things done at city hall, Naidu said the “hand-holding can be improved” when it comes to guiding potential new small business investors through the local bureaucracy. The development commission has a Small Business Centre, but it largely points entrepreneurs in the direction they need to go, and then it’s up to them to negotiate their way through the municipal bureaucracy.
For the established big developer or the experienced businessman, there are paid professionals and consultants who know how the city administration’s wheels spin, but Horwitz and Morgan said those in the small business sector, where the majority of jobs are created, are not being properly served in Windsor.
“As soon as someone brings an application in, someone (at city hall) should be guiding you through and ultimately be responsible for your file,” said Horwitz.
That’s exactly what was promised in 2014, when then-mayor Eddie Francis held a news conference to announce creation of a “one-stop shopping model” to streamline Windsor development approval and building permit processes. Acknowledging at the time that “frustrating delays” were an issue, one of the promises was to have a bureaucrat dedicated to, and responsible for, each development application.
Two years later, changes have been implemented, but Windsor’s city planner said the hand-holding bureaucrat isn’t one of them.
“We have realities … one of them is staffing levels,” Hunt told the Star.
The 88 “business process improvements” currently being implemented are helping to streamline the way Windsor’s planning department tackles applications, but other departments, like building services — the source of many of the complaints from the local small business sector — have yet to undergo a similar process.
Dilkens said most of the “easier ones” among the 88 business process improvements have been completed and that the goal continues to be making the entire process easier for small business. He said the most recent budget, for example, included 3.5 new positions in the building department, which is “seeing a pickup in calls — our economy is improving.”
Hunt said he’s aware of the complaints but he hears the same red-tape stories when he meets with his peers on a provincial board of Ontario planning directors.
Markham developer Henry Tam said he’s “welcomed with open arms” elsewhere and that he hadn’t experienced the same issues as in Windsor when it came to simply wanting to execute a facade improvement. But the City of Burlington, where Tam has been issued building permits in the past, advised the Star it requires the same zoning review and building permit for even a “small cosmetic change to a building downtown.”
Hunt and others on the receiving end of complaints point out that much of the bureaucracy, as well as the time it takes to get permits and plans approved, is prescribed by provincial legislation, like the Planning Act and the Building Code Act.
“Do we want to worship the rules and worship the process?” asks Morgan. He agrees, “we should have order,” but he also wonders how much some of that bureaucracy might be getting in the way of growing the local economy.
Dilkens said those with suggestions on ways to improve things “should be very comfortable with bringing ideas forward.”
But not everyone appears that comfortable. Said one local business leader in an email to the Star begging off an interview request: “We all do business with the city and do not want to alienate anyone or be seen to criticize.”
Said Morgan, whose outspoken small business advisory committee was disbanded by the last council: “It’s why I became their spokesman.”
Even Muir and Jorgensen expressed reluctance to speak out on their exciting project for 415 Ouellette Ave. But they felt compelled to bring the issue to light because it had been such a frustrating experience to be so close to creating something exciting for the downtown, and then to see it fail.
Dilkens said he too loved the plan for the former Drunkin’ Burrito site and that he became personally involved in trying to achieve a satisfactory accommodation. He said the city was willing to extend the 90-day notice to 180 days should there ever be the need for a removal order for the patio overhangs above Ouellette Avenue (he said there was no problem with the rear skyway to the parking garage).
“The argument our legal department made, I think, was sound,” Dilkens said of the need for an easement agreement “to protect the interests of the city and the public.” He said the municipality had to have the power to act, for example, “if we have an issue of people dropping glasses onto the sidewalk below.”
“It’s unfortunate we couldn’t come to an agreement there,” said the mayor.
Meanwhile, the property that once housed the Drunkin’ Burrito remains a vacant hole. “It’s not costing us a ton of money to keep it as empty land,” said Muir.
The DWBIA’s Horwitz and Morgan both worry that, with the latest news on job investment in the automotive sector, led by FCA Canada’s 1,200 new Windsor Assembly Plant positions, Windsor might lose sight of the urgency in supporting the small business sector and diversifying the local economy from the bottom up.
“It’s our only hope in this city,” said Morgan of the potential to grow small businesses here.
Successful entrepreneur Gerald Regan describes Windsor as a “hotbed of entrepreneurial thought,” but there has to be more focus on fostering the next job generators.
“They need to make it easier,” Regan said of Windsor’s city hall. Regan and his wife fell in love with Windsor, stayed to raise a family and started growing businesses (Nerds on Site, The Coffee Office and others) which are now active in “a couple dozen countries.”
Travelling the globe on business, Regan said he visits many cities where there’s “a tremendous focus on ‘let’s get things done’ — you just pick up the phone … it really is so common sense.”
The beauty of supporting a hometown entrepreneur, according to Morgan, is that they invest, spend, hire and expand locally. If and when they go global, added Regan,”the dollars eventually come back to where the headquarters are.”
“Every single person has that spark,” Regan said, adding it could be a Windsor woman in her kitchen with a dynamite cookie recipe.
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