Halifax to blame for stalled Bloomfield development, developer says

A Halifax developer is disappointed the city failed to step in and remove the province from the Bloomfield redevelopment after years without progress.

Louie Lawen of Lawen Group and Dexel Developments was one of three bidders on the project to develop public space and provide affordable and market-value housing on the former school site in the Halifax's north end.

Two private bids lost out to Housing Nova Scotia, mainly because the province was willing to pay almost double for the property compared to other developers. But almost four years later, nothing has happened at the site and the province recently announced it would not move ahead with the project.

While it never did buy the land, the provincial government did spent $1.4 million on the project.

Not the province's fault

Lawen said he doesn't fault the province for the situation for a number of reasons: the government moves slow at the best of times, there was a change of government two years into the process and the province has no development experience, he said.

He does, however, have a problem with the city not getting involved at some point.

"Usually, during due diligence, you have to show progress," he said.

Lawen believes city ignored public's wishes

Given how much public consultation went into developing the master plan for the project, Lawen said he thinks the city ignored the document's vision and the public's wishes in favour of more money from the province.

"The dilemma is time is of the essence," he said. "So that's what kind of shocked me in the fact that it took four years. And that's fine, people make mistakes."

Doesn't understand further delays

But given everything that's happened — or not, as the case may be — Lawen said he doesn't understand why the city is further delaying the project by waiting for the completion of the centre plan, something unlikely to happen before December.

"They already have a master plan, they already know everything they want," said Lawen. "Centre plan is not Noah's Ark of development that will save the world."

Mayor Mike Savage said the city wants to move ahead with developing the site in a way that honours the master plan and happens as quickly as possible.

Other frustrations

Lawen is also frustrated that the municipality didn't not simply award the project to the next highest ranked bidder.

"Usually if the first bid doesn't work, you'd automatically recommend the second bid. That's why there's a marking process," he said. "It's kind of a standard in the public bidding process."

But Savage said because of the amount of time that has passed, it wasn't appropriate to just turn over the project to another bidder.

'There has to be a process that has integrity'

"There's a lot of things that happen in three and a half years," he said.

"The value of the property has probably gone up.

"I suppose it's conceivable you could go and have conversations, but there has to be a process that has integrity and I think a three-and-a-half-year lapse is a long time to expect that you could just go back and pick up people who bid on a previous project."

Lawen said he thinks these types of situations help create public mistrust of developers and city hall.

"It is a function of mistakes that happen and I don't think it's helpful for the entire city to have these boarded-up, vacant fenced-off sites. It doesn't look good."

Interested in another crack at it

Despite his frustrations, Lawen thinks the project can still happen and, if the conditions remain the same, he'd be interested in bidding again.

"We actually poured our guts, our soul and guts — we put a lot of work into it. Yes, we would be interested," he said.

"Unfortunately, we're left with an empty parking lot. I mean, who knows, it may sit there for arguably another 10 years."