More than a dozen south-end residents spent hours on Thursday telling Ottawa's planning committee yet again to reject a proposed warehouse in a Barrhaven business park they feared could cause truck traffic, noise and pollution.

Still, even after the area's councillors added their pleas, the committee voted 7 to 3 to endorse the site plan for a distribution warehouse.

The plan was put forward by Medusa, a holding company for Broccolini. A consultant for Medusa said it doesn't know yet what company will use the building.

Usually, a project's site plan doesn't even hit a committee for councillors to debate, but Gloucester-South Nepean Coun. Carol Anne Meehan removed staff's authority to approve it, after public backlash over what might be built on long-vacant land in the South Merivale Business Park.

"It's the only tool that I really had," Meehan said, explaining why she wanted colleagues to hear residents once again describe the impact the warehouse could have.

"There are few projects I feel more emotional about than this particular one because it has the potential to be disastrous."

The idea of a truck terminal in the business park first caused outcry and packed virtual meetings this spring. City council eventually approved the rezoning.

Around the same time, the City of Ottawa received a different application on the same property for a 25,896 square metre building with 100 truck bays. This one already met zoning for light industrial, however, and staff had only to approve the site plan —its landscaping, elevations, and servicing, for instance — until Meehan sent it to committee.

Kevin MacDonald lives on Merivale Road. He pointed out the multi-storey Amazon warehouse along Highway 416. That location makes sense, he said.

"There's no logistical reason why this works. There's none," said MacDonald, who fears regular transport truck traffic on Merivale Road near a school, and far from a 400-series highway. "For the life of me, I think we're about to make a gigantic mistake."

"You could dismiss it as NIMBYism, not-in-my-backyard, but that's really not what's going on," added Jordan Lane-Beveridge, president of the Country Place Community Association. "We do not understand, nor do I think city staff understand, the levels of pollution, noise, dust."

Knoxdale-Merivale Coun. Keith Egli had called the warehouse site plan one of the most frustrating planning exercises he had dealt with during his decade on city council.

He didn't have a vote on planning committee, but urged colleagues to listen to the city — its residents, that is, not its municipal planning staff.

"They don't think it's right. They don't think it's appropriate," Egli said. "They said to us... the infrastructure's not good enough for adding hundreds of trucks coming down our roads, in and out. This is lived experience."

Planning committee co-chair Coun. Scott Moffatt agreed distribution warehouses are best located near 400-series highways. Perhaps a building that caters to processing packages should be defined more precisely than "light industrial" in the future, he said.

For now, though, Moffatt said the committee "can't just pull the zoning away because we don't like it."

"The reality is, property owners have property rights, and we've given them the zoning, and we can't always just be upset once they come and propose something that fits that zoning," Moffatt said.

The project now returns to city staff to finish the site plan agreement.