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Councillors should be careful what they say about the Hard Rock casino’s effort to add more gambling tables to the Rideau Carleton Raceway, the city’s top lawyer has warned them, even though the casino is trying to undermine a city council decision.
The Rideau Carleton’s relatively small casino is limited to 21 tables for things like poker and roulette, thanks to zoning set by the city and reaffirmed in 2013. Hard Rock signed a deal with the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. last spring to take over the provincial gambling agency’s operation, and now it’s asking the city’s committee of adjustment to up the limit to 35 tables as part of a major internal makeover. The vote’s on Nov. 14.
This is very much like treating the Salvation Army’s proposal for a major new shelter and social-services complex as a mere zoning matter. Worse, actually, because at least that’s coming up for a council vote.
The committee of adjustment deals with “variances” to the city’s zoning rules. Wee little exceptions: Can we build a deck that’s a couple of feet closer to the property line than it’s supposed to be? We have a carport — can we put a door on the front and make it a garage?
It’s mostly fiddly work, done by small panels of people (not even named on the city’s website) appointed by city council for their technical expertise and infinite patience. Which is why, city solicitor O’Connor has told city councillors in a memo, those city councillors need to watch themselves.
“(G)iven the quasi-judicial role of the committee of adjustment and the fact its members are appointed by council, staff advise caution in members of council making submissions to the committee,” he wrote. Anybody, including a city councillor, can go speak when the committee meets at Ben Franklin Place, but councillors’ positions as the panellists’ arm’s-length overseers means they should avoid being seen exerting undue influence.
The Rideau Carleton Raceway has had slot machines for a long time, thanks to a provincial effort to subsidize the frail horse-racing industry with the proceeds from gambling. To class things up a little bit and bring in a different kind of money, the track asked to add a handful of table games in 2011 and city council said yes, you can have 21 of them. (Casino Rama, for comparison, has about 100; the Lac-Leamy casino has about 65.) City council agreed, putting the number into the property’s zoning.
In 2013, when the province wanted to boost its gambling profits by building new casinos as entertainment centres in multiple cities, city council wrestled with the issue mightily. It went on for months, with some councillors dreaming about a riverboat casino on the Rideau Canal, a flashy new building on Sparks Street or in the ByWard Market, and a serious bid by Eugene Melnyk of the Ottawa Senators to have one in Kanata.
But unless they’re gigantic tourist draws casinos suck money out of local economies (the city’s stumblebum economic-development department did not study the impact of a casino here at the time), they destroy people prone to addiction, and they tend to be fortresses rather than exciting developments that bring life to the blocks around them. Eventually city councillors woke up and the fantasy fizzled.
That August, council took a 16-7 vote to tell the OLG it can spiff up the operation at the Rideau Carleton if it wants, “on the understanding that the only location acceptable to the City of Ottawa for an expanded gaming facility is the current location at the Rideau Carleton Raceway, with the current allocation of 1,250 slots and the approved expansion for 21 gaming tables.” Literally the least enthusiastic, most limited endorsement possible. Councillors added a bunch of conditions to limit the damage for problem gamblers, too, like mandatory closing hours and a limit on how much a mark can lose in a day.
Got it, OLG said. Then it signed a deal with Hard Rock, planning a $320-million project completely at odds with all that. Here we are with the first poke, this application to change the zoning city council approved in 2011 and reaffirmed in 2013, to up the number of table games at the raceway by two-thirds, like it’s no big thing.
It’s directly at odds with the conditions city council set four years ago, earlier in this same process. Councillors knew that OLG was imagining a big casino. They debated it in detail and decided explicitly, by a large margin, that Ottawa did not want it. Undermining that decision is a big thing. It’s a betrayal. It’s predatory.
Neither the Rideau Carleton (which doesn’t actually run the gambling operation) nor the Hard Rock people’s PR flacks in Tallahassee answered calls on this on Tuesday.
O’Connor the city lawyer told councillors that the committee of adjustment has to hear the application: the casino people have filed their papers and paid their fee and they’re entitled to due process. That process could conclude with the committee deciding that this isn’t a minor enough change to be its business, but the committee can’t just reject the application out of hand.
Fair enough: that can be city councillors’ job. And if the committee of adjustment denies it to them by approving the request, they can descend on its next meeting with blowtorches.
查看原文...
The Rideau Carleton’s relatively small casino is limited to 21 tables for things like poker and roulette, thanks to zoning set by the city and reaffirmed in 2013. Hard Rock signed a deal with the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. last spring to take over the provincial gambling agency’s operation, and now it’s asking the city’s committee of adjustment to up the limit to 35 tables as part of a major internal makeover. The vote’s on Nov. 14.
This is very much like treating the Salvation Army’s proposal for a major new shelter and social-services complex as a mere zoning matter. Worse, actually, because at least that’s coming up for a council vote.
The committee of adjustment deals with “variances” to the city’s zoning rules. Wee little exceptions: Can we build a deck that’s a couple of feet closer to the property line than it’s supposed to be? We have a carport — can we put a door on the front and make it a garage?
It’s mostly fiddly work, done by small panels of people (not even named on the city’s website) appointed by city council for their technical expertise and infinite patience. Which is why, city solicitor O’Connor has told city councillors in a memo, those city councillors need to watch themselves.
“(G)iven the quasi-judicial role of the committee of adjustment and the fact its members are appointed by council, staff advise caution in members of council making submissions to the committee,” he wrote. Anybody, including a city councillor, can go speak when the committee meets at Ben Franklin Place, but councillors’ positions as the panellists’ arm’s-length overseers means they should avoid being seen exerting undue influence.
The Rideau Carleton Raceway has had slot machines for a long time, thanks to a provincial effort to subsidize the frail horse-racing industry with the proceeds from gambling. To class things up a little bit and bring in a different kind of money, the track asked to add a handful of table games in 2011 and city council said yes, you can have 21 of them. (Casino Rama, for comparison, has about 100; the Lac-Leamy casino has about 65.) City council agreed, putting the number into the property’s zoning.
In 2013, when the province wanted to boost its gambling profits by building new casinos as entertainment centres in multiple cities, city council wrestled with the issue mightily. It went on for months, with some councillors dreaming about a riverboat casino on the Rideau Canal, a flashy new building on Sparks Street or in the ByWard Market, and a serious bid by Eugene Melnyk of the Ottawa Senators to have one in Kanata.
But unless they’re gigantic tourist draws casinos suck money out of local economies (the city’s stumblebum economic-development department did not study the impact of a casino here at the time), they destroy people prone to addiction, and they tend to be fortresses rather than exciting developments that bring life to the blocks around them. Eventually city councillors woke up and the fantasy fizzled.
That August, council took a 16-7 vote to tell the OLG it can spiff up the operation at the Rideau Carleton if it wants, “on the understanding that the only location acceptable to the City of Ottawa for an expanded gaming facility is the current location at the Rideau Carleton Raceway, with the current allocation of 1,250 slots and the approved expansion for 21 gaming tables.” Literally the least enthusiastic, most limited endorsement possible. Councillors added a bunch of conditions to limit the damage for problem gamblers, too, like mandatory closing hours and a limit on how much a mark can lose in a day.
Got it, OLG said. Then it signed a deal with Hard Rock, planning a $320-million project completely at odds with all that. Here we are with the first poke, this application to change the zoning city council approved in 2011 and reaffirmed in 2013, to up the number of table games at the raceway by two-thirds, like it’s no big thing.
It’s directly at odds with the conditions city council set four years ago, earlier in this same process. Councillors knew that OLG was imagining a big casino. They debated it in detail and decided explicitly, by a large margin, that Ottawa did not want it. Undermining that decision is a big thing. It’s a betrayal. It’s predatory.
Neither the Rideau Carleton (which doesn’t actually run the gambling operation) nor the Hard Rock people’s PR flacks in Tallahassee answered calls on this on Tuesday.
O’Connor the city lawyer told councillors that the committee of adjustment has to hear the application: the casino people have filed their papers and paid their fee and they’re entitled to due process. That process could conclude with the committee deciding that this isn’t a minor enough change to be its business, but the committee can’t just reject the application out of hand.
Fair enough: that can be city councillors’ job. And if the committee of adjustment denies it to them by approving the request, they can descend on its next meeting with blowtorches.
查看原文...
