WINNIPEG'S downtown development agency is close to completing a land-assembly puzzle that should allow a Chipman family-owned commercial complex to rise on the north side of Portage Avenue.
On Tuesday, city council's downtown development committee will consider a CentreVenture plan to close part of a lane running between the MTS Exhibition Centre and the former Wild Planet building on Donald Street.
On its own, it looks like a routine move. But the lane closure represents the end of a two-year-old effort to quietly acquire parcels of land in the city block bounded by Portage Avenue, Donald Street, Ellice Avenue and Hargrave Street.
The Chipman-owned Longboat Development Corp., hopes to transform a chunk of the block into a commercial development that may include a hotel, a new commercial building and a 400-to-450-stall parkade.
"We're getting close," Longboat president Scott Stephanson said Wednesday in an interview. Tenants still need to be lined up in order to allow the project to proceed, he said. "It's a complicated process and a complicated project."
Longboat already owns three properties on the block: the Wild Planet building, the Alabama retail strip on Ellice and the Norlyn office building on Hargrave. CentreVenture and the Forks-North Portage Partnership own two Portage Avenue properties they intend to sell to Longboat at fair market value: the MTS Exhibition Centre and the Mitchell-Copp Building, respectively.
The lane between the exhibition centre and Wild Planet building is simply the last piece of the puzzle, said CentreVenture president and CEO Ross McGowan.
McGowan and Stephanson hope to announce details of the project at the end of June.
The parkade component is not a forgone conclusion, as the city has issued a public call for private partners interested in building a parkade with the help of $5 million derived from the city's sale of the Winnipeg Square parkade. Longboat is not the only interested applicant.
Whatever form it takes, the new project would be located across Portage Avenue from the MTS Centre, within an 11-block area of downtown the city intends to declare a new sports, hospitality and entertainment district, or SHED.
This zone would also encompass the Winnipeg Convention Centre, Metropolitan Theatre and Burton Cummings Theatre. Once the zone is enacted, some of the new property-tax dollars flowing from improvements within the SHED would be reinvested back into the immediate area, likely in the form of streetscaping and other infrastructure improvements.
Unlike the tax incentives in place to stimulate downtown housing in Winnipeg, this tax-increment-financing plan will not see any dollars flow back into developers' hands, McGowan insisted.
"It's for public-sector improvements, not private-sector developments," he said. "It's important the benefits of the redevelopment are equally shared."
McGowan also said the Portage Avenue redevelopment plan does not depend on an NHL franchise moving into the MTS Centre. And neither does the Longboat project in particular.
While a Chipman-owned hotel across Portage Avenue from the hockey arena would stand to benefit from NHL-related traffic, the Longboat plan does not depend on a NHL franchise moving to Winnipeg, McGowan said.
"This development really has nothing to do with the NHL. We've been working on this for 18 months," he said. "I don't think I can stress that enough."
-- with files from Murray McNeill
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
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