City returns to appeals board seeking order to have Capital Pointe hole filled

The City of Regina is asking yet again for a backfill order for the Capital Pointe construction site at the corner of Albert Street and Victoria Avenue.

Capital Pointe was first announced in 2009 and was set to become Regina's tallest building. It was originally scheduled to be done by June 2015.

On Friday morning the Saskatchewan Building and Accessibility Standards Appeal Board held a limited appeal hearing to re-hear portions of previous testimony.

Danae Lemieux, senior traffic engineer with the City of Regina, said Westgate had failed to renew or reapply for a street use permit (SUP). The permit allows a work site to use part of a roadway, sidewalk or other city property. Westgate has not had a valid SUP since March 2018, Lemieux said.

Westgate did not attend Friday's proceedings.

City of Regina Commercial Building Inspector Jeremy Chalupiak also spoke before the board. Chalupiak said he was in charge of inspecting the work site several times a month. He said that during his inspections from July to December of 2018 no work had been done by Westgate at the site and that he asked Westgate to file monitory reports on the work site but it failed to do so. 

Chalupiak said he observed a berm in the north-west corner of the work site that had been eroded by water draining from a nearby alley.

Christine Clifford, who represents the City, said monitory reports need to be conducted for the sake of keeping the project safe. In her words, "movements indicating imminent failure are in the millimetres" and Westgate is not monitoring the site. 

There are no current or pending building permits for the site and no application has been made for an SUP. 

Clifford said Westgate has made no progress on the project since a previous appeal in August of 2018. During that hearing the board gave the developer three options:

• To "commence, continue, and carry out construction of the project to completion," so long as construction resumed by April 1 2018 and was completed by March 2022.
• To build permanent protection to the shoring on the site.
• To backfill the site.

Clifford asked that the board order Westgate to fill the hole over a period of two weeks and rule that, if Westgate failed to do so, the filling of the hole be contracted out through Sask Tenders.

"The city doesn't desire to backfill this property. This is not our best case scenario. Our best case scenario scenario was a building," Clifford said.