A pair of developers say they were blindsided by the Official Community Plan review.
At last night’s (Wednesday) public hearing on the Official Community Plan, the developers voiced their displeasure with the City. One of the developers even said they would be taking legal action against the City if their concerns are not addressed.
According to Will Dong and Navdeep Aulakh, the properties they plan to develop were removed from the Urban Containment Boundary in the plan. (See map on page 68)
Dong’s company, North Star Living Ltd., owns the property at 4729 Shamrock Road, and plans to build approximately 500 residential units there.
“We made a purchase and investment development decision on this property three years ago based on the current OCP, with support for 22 units per hectare,” he said.
Dong said they did a lot of work to develop the concept plan, which was reviewed by the City’s planning department, at which point Dong said they received a letter on the next steps.
“In the meanwhile, they did not tell us anything about the OCP change,” he said.
“They asked us to do a comprehensive neighbourhood plan, which involves a lot of work, and investment, and knowledge, and they are changing the OCP of the land without letting us know.”
Dong said neighbours of the property didn’t know anything about it either.
“We had an active plan in the plan in the planning department, and they don’t even tell us about it,” he said.
Dong said the property is ready to go for development.
“It’s not only my loss, it’s really the citizen’s loss,” he said.
“If this is not happening, we are going to take legal actions against the City.”
Aulakh shared a similar concern about his property on 2913 Silvercrest Road, but did not say anything about legal action during the public hearing.
“The reason for getting us this property, obviously we had done our proper due diligence, which was done with the planning department with the City of Prince George,” he said.
“We were advised that you can go and do this development right away, without any hesitation or without any red flags over there. The only reason we bought this property was because this was a green signal given to us through the City of Prince George.”
According to Aulakh’s correspondence, the property is capable of supporting up to 759 residential units under the current OCP, but it does not say if that’s how many he would build.
Aulakh said they’ve been doing developments in the Fraser Valley for roughly 20 years, and this was their first foray into Prince George.
“This was something which was completely out of the blue which came to us,” he said.
“We were not even informed, anything about this situation, nothing came to us, I had to just send an email to the Mayor and to the Council members so that something can be done about it, because this is like a complete push given to us that we were not even aware of exactly, otherwise there was no reason for us to get something going with the City of Prince George.”
Aulakh said they were stuck.
“We just want to stick with what exactly when we got the property, because we are in the process of putting an application together right now.”
A City Spokesperson told My PG Now they will be providing a response.
The public hearing will resume on April 9th at 7:00 pm.
If Council decides to make amendments following that hearing, a subsequent public hearing will be held.
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