Residents of Harley Street have lost an appeal against a proposed apartment complex to be built on the site of Idle Wheels trailer park.
The ruling came Thursday from the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission.
L & A MacEachern Holdings Ltd. owns the trailer park land. It applied for rezoning, seeking a medium density residential R3 designation.
The city turned it down, but MacEachern appealed to IRAC and won.
Residents were outraged, saying they didn’t know about the IRAC hearing. The city of Charlottetown requested a reconsideration, which was granted and held in January.
In the ruling issued this week, IRAC declined to overturn its first ruling that supports the developer.
“At the present hearing, there was considerable comment to the effect that the commission should have shown more deference to the decision of city council,” said IRAC’s ruling on Thursday.
In response it turned to its original ruling where it said: “While the commission tends to defer to the actions of the elected council on such matters, that is not an absolute . . .”
It said the official plan allowed for the rezoning and that both city staff and the planning board recommended the rezoning.
IRAC said that it knows Charlottetown City Council is not bound by that, but “ . . . the commission cannot satisfy itself that sufficient reasons have been offered to reject that advice in this case.”
The commission said that during the January public hearing the issue was raised about the role of the Official Plan which calls for the “preservation of existing neighborhoods.”
That line of argument could have been raised at the first IRAC hearing so it is not some new or changed circumstance. An appeal needs to hear only about changed circumstances, not information that was readily available for the first hearing, said IRAC.
Another case in point is the issue of increased traffic raised at the January hearing. It had already been explored at the first IRAC hearing so can’t be considered again at the appeal, said Thursday’s ruling.
Another of the concerns raised at the January public hearing was the cost and disruption the rezoning would impose on the existing residents.
“In effect, these submissions are asking the commission to temper or modify its decision given the impact of the rezoning on residents of the trailer court,” said Thursday’s decision.
The law does not give the commission such a power, it said. The commission suggested that the city, if it really was worried about displaced trailer owners, could change the official plan to allow for the development of new trailer parks “ . . . including parks which would welcome safe, well-maintained older mobile homes.”
The city and other Island communities might consider “innovative” trailer parks, such as co-operatives “where stability and pride of ownership would be interwoven into the development,” said Thursday’s ruling.
There were also concerns raised by residents about the size and scope of the proposed Harley street project. Those issues can and should be addressed later, at the stage of arriving at a development agreement and issuing a development permit, said IRAC.