Owners of the Kanata Golf and Country Club have given the proverbial middle finger to the city’s planning process by laying bare an aggressive strategy to bypass city hall by going straight to a development-friendly provincial tribunal to win their case for developing the property. The decision was revealed Friday.
It also intends to challenge the legality of a 40-year-old legal agreement to retain the property as green space forever.
The strategy is sure to heighten tensions with frustrated Kanata residents who have launched a well-funded campaign to preserve the green space from development and who insist the city has an ironclad legal obligation to do exactly that. So far, the city has played along.
But ClubLink now says that an agreement between the original developers of the Kanata Lakes course and the former Municipality of Kanata restricting development of the course is unenforceable and, in fact, should never have been signed nearly 40 years ago.
That agreement stipulated that at least 40 per cent of Kanata Lakes would remain green space forever. Since the golf course comprises a large portion of that green space, developing it now would, in effect, violate that long-standing agreement.
But, again, ClubLink plans to make the case that it can’t be bound by an agreement that was illegal in the first place.
A superior court was scheduled to hear specific arguments about the enforceability of the 40 per cent agreement several weeks ago, but it was cancelled at the last minute after a new party entered the fray — Imperial Tobacco.
Now, what possible interest could a tobacco company have in a golf course redevelopment in Kanata?
Turns out Imperial Tobacco, formerly known as IMASCO, purchased a development company named Genstar in 1986. The company happens to be the original owner of the golf course property and so it may have a vested interest in any legal proceedings around the terms of a deal it signed with the former Kanata municipality in 1981. Who knows? It might even claim its financial interests were harmed by having to abide by the 40 per cent agreement when it sold the property to ClubLink in 1996.
None of this has really slowed development plans much. Developers were scheduled to renew drilling on the property Friday and will likely continue doing so through this week.
In the meantime, frustration among Kanata residents is growing, based in part on ClubLink’s decision, so far, to ignore hundreds of technical questions related to the development from city staff and Kanata residents. Those included everything from water drainage issues to traffic management.
“At this time ClubLink has not responded to the technical comments or submitted any new information to address any of the concerns that City staff and our community have identified,” a frustrated Kanata North Coun. Jenna Sudds said Friday in an email to residents of her ward.
