Plans are afoot for a new highrise at the north-east corner of North Delta.
Delta has received an application from Satish Sharma to rezone and develop the properties between 9553 and 9571 120th St. in order to make way for a new 31-storey mixed use development.
The highrise would include 220 residential units and 126 square metres (1,356 square feet) of commercial space on the ground floor, with vehicle access off of 95A Avenue.
Council signed off on beginning the public consultation process Monday night (Feb. 26), and city staff will begin a public consultation process that will include signage at the site, a project page on Delta’s municipal website, a notification letter to be sent to surrounding property owners in North Delta and Surrey and a public information meeting at a still-to-be-determined future date.
Delta staff had recommended that the notification letter be sent beyond the usual 100-metre radius in order to encompass the entire Townline Node neighbourhood, including properties north of 92nd Avenue, east of the railway tracks, south of 96 Avenue and west of 120th Street, but that was expanded to include properties as far west as 116th Street at the behest of council.
Only Surrey properties within 100 metres of the proposed development will receive the letter.
Delta will also be consulting about the application with the City of Surrey, Delta School Board, Metro Vancouver and TransLink.
It’s a long ways off yet, but should the rezoning bylaw pass second reading, the city would hold a public hearing on the proposal.
City staff were unable to offer council a timeline on the public consultation.
Marcy Sangret, Delta’s director of community planning and development, said staff will first need to complete an internal review of the application before presenting it to the public.
“The first step of any application is for us to review it for completeness and to do our interdepartmental referrals … and then we send preliminary comments back to the applicant,” Sangret said, noting Sharma has yet to submit a traffic impact study for the project. “Then we set the public information meeting at that point.”
Sangret said Delta’s review will run concurrently with the city’s development of a neighbourhood plan for the Townline Node. She said her best guess would be that the city is “several months away” from holding a public information meeting on the highrise proposal, and that next steps would be determined based on the feedback they receive at that time.
Sangret said that in an ideal situation, applicants , I would say six months is what we tend to advise people at the outset, that they could be looking at, and that’s assuming the application has all the components right up front and depending on what we hear back from the community when we first advise them.”
The project is the third 30-plus storey tower to be proposed for the Delta side of 120th. The 37-storey Delta Rise, at 120th Street and 80th Avenue, was completed in May of last year, bringing 317 new units of housing to the area.
Another highrise is being considered for the north-west corner of 120th Street and 75A Avenue. The project, which includes a 35-storey highrise on the corner of 120th and 75A, plus 16 townhomes along 120th and 10 more bordering 119A Street, would add 294 units to the area.
READ MORE: North Delta highrise application updated ahead of second round of consultation
The proposal has been the subject of two public information sessions and was reviewed by Delta’s advisory design panel on Feb. 22, but has not yet been considered for first reading by council.
At Monday’s council meeting, Counc. Jeannie Kanakos asked, in light of the number of highrise projects on the horizon in Delta, if staff could set up a workshop were council could learn more about what other municipalities look for when evaluating proposed highrise developments.
“These are complex projects and it may be very beneficial to learn the core elements of what is needed to be considered in a highrise development, as well as best practices being used in other communities who may have more experience than Delta in building highrises,” Kanakos said.
Acting city manager Ken Kuntz replied that current workloads preclude staff from putting a workshop together right now, but said they are willing to advise council on best practices “a little later in the season,” concurrent with the in-house review of this latest highrise application.
“The concept of trying to understand and have a better handle on the things we have learned, even from the Delta Rise, has not gone unnoticed from staff. We’ve learned some things from that development that we don’t want to repeat, there are also lots of good things in that development that we do want to repeat,” Kuntz said.
“As we get closer we can do some reviews of best practices that help us — whether it’s fire suppression, whether it’s how the strata works, the parking situations. We can do that and bring that back to council.”
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