Only the credit and blame to be decided

Credit for a $110,000 settlement for the residents’ groups that protested a 15,669-square-metre SmartCentre development at 70 and 80 Wicksteed Ave. belongs to either city councillor John Parker or the Leaside Property Owners’ Association, depending on whom you ask.

“They blame me for everything,” Parker said of the LPOA. “They think I was in the pockets of the developer and didn’t do what I was told by the residents, and if only I had handled the file differently then we would have had a different result.”

[attach]7021[/attach]The settlement was reached in April. Construction of the shopping complex, whose anchor tenant remains unknown, is set to begin this fall and be completed sometime in 2014.

Under the settlement’s terms, both the LPOA and Leaside Unite — an upstart group formed to protest the development and which subsequently became a committee of the association — formally withdrew their objections.

LPOA vice-president Carol Fripp called it “the best that we could do.”

“We didn’t have Councillor Parker’s support,” she said. “He criticized us at North York Community Council for having fought… But if we hadn’t fought we wouldn’t have ended up with a settlement.”

Fripp said $50,000 of the settlement money will be used to fund a neighbourhood-led traffic study, while the rest will be used to initiate the creation of a Leaside heritage district, and to contribute to the formation of a Bayview Business Improvement Area, that would help the area’s businesses compete with larger developments.

“We think the Bayview merchants will be affected, and not in a good way,” she said.

Acknowledging the criticism leveled by the community groups, Parker contends that he strove to include both the LPOA and Leaside Unite in every stage of the review process. He arranged meetings between the groups and city staff, and required SmartCentres to share the application and all of its development studies with the public, he said.

“They had the same access to the whole process that I did,” he said.

In the end, SmartCentres’ most vocal opponent was Leaside resident Alan Redway, who argued before community council that if the city wants to keep Leaside’s remaining industrial jobs then it should reject commercial development on its industrial land.

“Intensive traffic generated by commercial and residential development is anathema to industry,” Redway said, noting that Leaside residents were “virtually unanimous” in rejecting a proposal to build apartments at the corner of Laird and Eglinton for similar reasons in 1972. “It drastically interferes with their deliveries and shipments.”

Parker acknowledged Redway’s comments, but countered that halting the area’s commercial development would be unrealistic, adding that the SmartCentres application was within the parameters of the city’s official plan.

“Nothing I heard undercut the evidence that supported the staff report that was eventually adopted,” he said.

Parker also said that at the residents’ request, he arranged for SmartCentres to construct a median on Laird Avenue, near Parkhurst Avenue, which will prevent drivers from using Parkhurst to cross from Bayview to Laird, and also prevent drivers from reaching the new shopping centre through Laird.

“The residents on Parkhurst were concerned throughout that there would be enormous traffic on their street as shoppers drove from Bayview directly to the shopping centre,” he said. “And residents on Laird have been complaining that drivers make illegal left turns off of Parkhurst onto northbound Laird.”