As the City of Corner Brook moves to amend its development regulations to add medical treatment and special care classifications of use to the downtown commercial zone, at least one councillor doesn’t agree with some of the proposed usages.
The amendment would give council the discretionary power to approve the operation of such things as children’s homes, convalescent homes, homes for the aged, orphanages, infirmaries, sanatoria and medical treatment centres in the downtown zone.
The proposed change has already gone through the public consultation process and during Tuesday’s council meeting a resolution was put forward to complete the change and submit it to the Department of Municipal Affairs for review and release to continue the process.
However, during discussion on the motion Coun. Josh Carey expressed concern with the amendment and asked that the matter be tabled for further review and discussion.
That lead to a new motion being presented to do that by Coun. Tony Buckle, which council approved.
But it wasn’t a unanimous decision.
After the meeting Carey said there were a couple of reasons why he wasn’t comfortable with the amendment.
“Some of the language that’s contained within the amendment says that you can have a group home, you can have an infirmed home or you can have an orphanage located in the downtown area.”
He’d like to see the group home and infirmary usages stricken from the motion.
“Our downtown area is our business area,” said Carey.
“The downtown corridor should be for business and for business development only. We should not be entertaining that sort of usage.”
Carey said those usages could probably be better designated in other parts of the city.
“I guess what I see wrong with it is that it’s a different use category from business use category or from a category that looks at economic development within that particular corridor.”
Carey also has concerns related to the appeal of council’s decision to deny a discretionary use application for a crematorium in the city. He said that appeal is questioning whether or not the city exercised its discretionary authority correctly.
“If there are going to be any repercussions from that or there are going to be repercussions because of a discretionary use decision item then we better make sure that we know exactly what we’re doing before we do it,” said Carey.
Mayor Jim Parsons said he voted against the motion because the matter had already passed through one step of the amendment process.
“It’s a discretionary change, so it’s not an automatic thing. We would still have the power to approve or not approve certain businesses that wanted to avail of that use class in that zone.”
Parsons said anytime the city can gain more authority of its own affairs he is generally for it.
While he voted against the motion, he still had no problem with having it looked at again even though he felt council had enough information.
“That’s what we should do and I’m glad the motion was made and we dealt with it that way.”
