Vintage Landing proposal

[DuaneT]

This is what is being reported in castanet this morning:

Land Swap Supported
After much debate at Monday's Council meeting, developer Grant Gaucher has moved another step closer with his proposed wellness resort at McKinley Landing.

Yesterday council agreed to support Gaucher's application to provincial agriculture land authorities to swap farm land with non-farm land so that a golf course and vineyard can be constructed.

Details of the Vintage Landing proposal include a 17-storey high-rise, 574 bungalows, a 600,000-square-foot "wellness centre", golf course and winery. The city is still waiting an area structure plan from Gaucher.

[DuaneT]

On Tuesday night Mr Gaucher, showed off his latest plans for the Vintage Landing Proposal. This included a separate access route to the resort. The hotel in the new plans is also changed. It's now smaller in size and placed further from Okanagan Lake.

If you have any more information about about this proposal, please send the information to [e-mail].

[DuaneT]

I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Gaucher today at the press conference for the Southwind at Sarsons development. Which i will say, is a fantastic development and will diffinitely enhance that area. We briefly talked about his plans at both the Southwind project and his Vintage Landing project. After hearing what he has planned for both areas, I will be telling everyone I meet to give him the full support he needs for these projects.

I also talked to Gail, Project Manager for Vintage Landing, who will be passing on some information for us to post here about that development. From what she discribed to me about the development I am looking forward to seeing the plans. Very Soon we will have overview of the project so we can all take a look.

So feel free to check back on a regular basis.

[DuaneT]

Here is some more information on the re-worked Vintage Landing proposal. It will cover 868 acres and include 204 suite strata resort hotel, 596 bungalows, a health and wellness village, vineyard and winery, championship golf course, beach club, marina, outdoor education centre and retreat. The hotel portion will be built in two stages. There will be one 4.5 story hotel set back from the water and a 6.5 story hotel build further up the hill.

An all weather gondola will be used to connect the hotel to the beach club and pier. Which is a fantastic idea, should give a beautiful view of the surrounding area.

The resort village will have access to 25 km of trails for people to walk, hike or bike in the area. The development will also build a brand new access road that will connect to Glenmore Rd.

The developers will be going to city council in July with the area structure plan and will present a application for a comprehensive development zone for Vintage Landing to the advisory planning commission within a couple of weeks.

[DuaneT]

The Vintage Landing area structure plan is being presented to the APC on July 5th, and then to the city council the following week. If everything goes ahead as planed then a public hearing will be held on Aug 9th.

We hope to have that information available here for everyone to read and see after it is presented to the APC.

[DuaneT]

This was approved by city council tonight and will be heading to public hearing in August. ;D

[DuaneT]

Vintage Landing

The Vintage Landing Area Structure Plan has been forwarded to Public Hearing on August 9th. The Public Hearing will start at 5:00 p.m. rather than the usual 7:00 p.m. The application wishes to create a new comprehensive resort development zone to accommodate a resort and wellness village, golf course, vineyard and winery. City Council has directed staff to place this as the first agenda item. All correspondence for this Public Hearing should be sent directly to the City Clerk's Office after the formal notification date, July 22, and before 4:00 p.m. on August 8th. Please contact the City Clerk's Office at 862-3308 for more information

[Administrator]

Vintage Landing had its public meeting today to
1) Create the new CD18 zoning
2) Rezoning the properties from A1 agriculture to CD18 comprehensive resort development, P3 parks and open space and W2 Intensive Water use.
3) and apply the Vintage Landing Area Structure Plan to the OCP ( Official Community Plan ).

There were about 150-200 people there with about 34 people that spoke on Vintange Landing. Here is the breakdown and the support:

50 letters of support were submitted
16 signatures of support were submitted
5 letters against were submitted
22 people spoke in favour
6 people spoke against
5 people undecided

That makes:

88 in support
11 against
5 undecided

One lady went on a major rant over how council is wasting time discussing "rich people" resorts when they should be discussing help for the poor. Obviously she does not understand civic process for development proposals.

And John Zeger speaking on behave of CRCP was against the development. Instead of supporting a development that will provide over 30 kilometers of public natural trails, provide over 1/2 kilometer public beach access, a resort that preserves the natural environment, a wellness center that promotes health and wellness, a resort that will provide hundreds of full-time jobs of ALL wage levels and a resort that will promote the valleys very important tourism industry, John Zeger wants it to be more SPRAWL! Yes, you heard right - he wants it to be single family dwellings. Considering the location and views they would be all $500,000+ and destroy the environment! Go figure. His logic always escapes me. And he used he famous quote “High Income Transients”! John, why are you so down on people that are successful in life? Is there a story behind you hatred? I want to understand!

This just goes to show that he is indeed against all development regardless of the benefits to the community. I would love to see him speak in favour of something just once!

Anyway, council has deferred the decision till August 22 regular meeting. We will keep you informed.

[Guest]

Lies, lies, lies!That is what I have come to expect from the gang at PaveKelownaOver. At the public hearing on Vintage Landing Mr. Zeger said the area would be better developed for "family-oriented housing" not single-family housing as you state. As for that being "sprawl," everything that is less than 20 storeys is sprawl to you simple-minds. Your website really is just a shill for developers as Daily Courier columnist Ron Seymour observed some time ago as you now post advertisements for two major developers on your site, Westcorp and the G-Group of Companies (Grant Gauthier) developer of Vintage Landing. Just how much are you people getting paid for all this? As for hatred it is clear that the only people you love are developers and those that would benefit from development. You hate everybody else and mostly those who would have Kelowna become a genuine community in which people from all income groups can participate.

[Mathos]

MoveKelownaForward supported this development!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I thought you guys were against sprawl. Now you support development that puts jobs a 20 minute drive from Kelowna. I want to hear from Matt on this issue.

[DuaneT]

I will not speak for the other members of our group but I decided to support this development for a couple of reasons. Firstly for the economic benefits to our community, it will provide hundreds of jobs for this area and for our youth which is a good thing. I don’t know about you Mathos, but I grew up here and finding a good paying job back in the 80’s and 90’s was a really hard thing to do, unless you had a “in”.

And I personally believe that I would rather see a development like Vintage Landing be built then a huge development of single family homes at that location. Again growing up, I use to go mountain biking and Christmas tree hunting in that area, so I am familiar with it.

And as for Guest/Krishna’s rant about single/family housing, there will be a huge development built not 3 km from this area with over 1100 single family homes. It is in the final approval process. So in the big picture I would rather support a development that will be providing green space and a resort atmosphere then seeing hundreds of more homes being built, right along that side of Okanagan Lake. But then again Guest/Krishna’s responses are of an emotional one, not of one that thinks about the whole area, and to answer your other question about being paid, we have not received on single dime from any developer for what we are doing here.

Oh by the way, we are still looking for your answer on the question of (this question was asked of Guest/Krishna a couple weeks ago after another rant about affordable housing)
Also, if you would like to see a lot more affordable housing then answer this. If, hypothetically, a developer consolidated some land in Rutland and planned on developing a master planned affordable mixed use community ( with the majority of units around $130,000 ) through 4 highrises ( let's say 20, 18, 15 and 15 ) with some mid-rise podium units and townhomes, incorporated mixed use with a common park in the middle, would you be in favour of this

Someday I hope to meet you in person so we can have a public debate on this subject; I think it truly would be interesting. It fact it does not even have to be a public debate, we can meet somewhere for coffee and discuss it like two civilized gentlemen.

[Administrator]

At monday's council meeting Vintage Landing received their CD18 Comprehensive Resort Development Zoning by a close 5 – 4 decision. Here is a quick breakdown of the voting:

• Robert Hobson: voted no – he stated that he could not vote in favour without a sector plan
• Ron Cannan: voted no – he said that it was the biggest development the city has ever seen and he is not satisfied with the public consultation and wanted much more info
• Andre Blanleil: voted yes – he stated that this is not a housing development and that the valley needs more destination resorts for our tourism industry
• Barrie Clark: voted no – was very cynical with the developers proposal process. Initially it was a much bigger proposal that was scaled back. Barrie questioned this process. He also stated that the city is ignoring their own policies and claimed that this health wellness is just a 2 tiered health system.
• Sharon Shepherd: voted no - wanted more details on the environmental impact and overall sustainability. She was concerned about tapping into the lack for water and was not in favour of boating being part of the proposal which does not fit in with the wellness aspect.
• Al Horning: voted yes – stated that this project show we are a leader in innovation
• Brian Given: voted yes – stated that this is a comprehensive development zone so the city has total control over what gets built
• Colin Day: voted yes – initially was not in favour as he wanted to be sure that there would be no impact on the city tax cost – now he is satisfied that the city is secure
• Grey: deciding vote – voted yes – indicated that he was in favour of the concept for this city

[Jack Martha]

I have heard that the main entrance to Vintage landing is NOW back on McKinley road near where the bees are kept. It as well entails the straightening of McKinley Road. Has any one more information on this??

[Administrator]

News to me - I will see if Duane can find something out. Can you Duane??

[Jack Martha]

Thanks, I look forward to hearing from you.

[DuaneT]

Good Morning Jack and welcome to the forum.

As far as I know the main road will still be of Glenmore Rd closer to Lake Country. As for the access Rd off of Mckinley landing, I believe it is to be used for construction purposes only to and from the site. We will try to contact the developer for you and see if there are any updated plans.

Cheers
Duane

[DuaneT]

Hello Jack, We have had this information sent to us from the project manager for Vintage Landing.

"As for your question regarding the main access route to the resort, as was stated at the public hearing last summer, it will be a new road constructed off of Glenmore Rd. (north of Slater Rd. across from the second pond area as you drive north toward Lake Country). We have been using a roughed in road close to its eventual alignment for the forest work we've been doing. We committed this to be our primary access to the resort, and there has been no change to this committment. We have, however, been in discussion with City Staff to determine whether there would be more benefit to the City of Kelowna if we change the secondary access road (triggered at 50% of the resort's build out) to McKinley Rd. rather than Slater Rd. In these discussions we have agreed that if this becomes the case, McKinley Rd. will be rebuilt in its new alignment which is a much straighter route that eliminates the hair pin around McKinley Reservoir. Notwithstanding the decision about which road is the best choice for the secondary access route, we maintain our position that construction traffic into the site will be via the main access road and/or Slater. Rd."


Hope this answered some of your concerns.

Duane