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Off-site hotel parking presented as green solution
Posted By COREY LAROCQUE
More off-site parking will mean less of an impact on the Niagara escarpment, say developers of a five-star hotel that will be built into the moraine near Robinson Street.
City council gave Canadian Niagara Hotels permission to provide 71.5 per cent of the parking for its planned Westin hotel in a lot between Stanley and Allendale avenues instead of in a lot immediately attached to the hotel. It means 235 spaces will be three blocks from the hotel while 94 will be in an underground lot on the premises.
The company, which also owns the Brock Plaza and Sheraton-on-the-Falls hotels, plans to build the $130-million Westin Fallsview at the east end of Robinson Street at the top of the moraine, between the Skylon Tower and Jolley Cut path.
“It’s just a wonderful, wonderful project,” said company vice-president Michael DiCienzo. It will be the city’s first five-star hotel and will employ about 600 people, DiCienzo said.
But planning the hotel has been challenging because it’s on a small property at the top of the escarpment.
Council’s approval for off-site parking will allow the company to build only one level of underground parking, instead of four. Less underground parking would mean less excavation into the escarpment. Building one level underground will result in 1.6 million cubic feet of fill that won’t have to be disturbed, said architect Emilio Raimondo.
That’s a volume equivalent to two Niagara Falls Memorial arenas, he said.
The hotel proposal has been controversial for at least seven years. When Canadian Niagara Hotels purchased the land, it inherited the 26-storey height limit that had been approved at least 35 years ago. The city’s planning department recommended against the off-site parking request because it wasn’t clear how the tandem-valet service on Stanley Avenue would work and it could actually increase congestion. The hotel company plans to park cars four deep and have valets retrieve them as required.
Planning department official Bob Bolibruck said the city’s official plan encourages all parking for large-scale tourist comercial developments to provide parking on site, preferablly in underground parking garages.
But Bolibruck also showed a map, indicating where council has allowed 12 other hotels to provide guest parking in lots that aren’t attached to their hotel property.
Bolibruck acknowledged any development of the Canadian Niagara Hotel property would change the moraine.
With so much professional planning advice lined up against the proposal, city resident Teresa Johnson said it should have been “an automatic” for council to deny the hotel company’s request.
“Why is it that somebody would allow that when it’s already such a disaster down there (in the Fallsview area) with parking?” said Johnson, one of the speakers at Monday’s public planning meeting.
Coun. Janice Wing said if councillors really wanted to preserve the moraine, they would have considered it last fall when they approved a revision to the hotel plan, allowing it 518 rooms, up from the 340 rooms that had been approved in 2004.
When Wing made a motion to defer a vote on the issue, there was no seconder and her motion died. Later, Wing was the only vote against approving the off-site parking request.
Coun. Wayne Thomson said the city needs to review its reluctance to have hotel owners provide parking at remote locations from their businesses.
“Maybe it’s appropriate to look at off-site parking for some of these places, especially when they’re close to the moraine. I’d rather see all the cars out of there,” Thomson said.
Article ID# 947271
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