A three-building automobile dealership planned for a high-profile former garden-centre site on the Island Highway in Nanaimo has won approval from city council.
The property owner, a numbered company identified as 1960400 Ontario Ltd., intends to build Porsche and Subaru dealerships facing the highway and a service building attached to a two-storey parkade facing Wills Road.
The corner lot at 4900 Island Highway — north of Long Lake and south of Rutherford Road — was used by Long Lake Nurseries Garden Centre for 42 years. After the garden centre closed in 2017, the site was sold to the current owner.
Plans call for a 19,439-square-foot Subaru dealership next to a 14,014-square-foot Porsche dealership, and a service building of 9,289 square feet.
The dealership buildings are to be one storey each and clad in contemporary materials with high windows. The designs fit the corporate requirements for Subaru and Porsche dealerships, staff told council on Monday.
The City of Nanaimo received an application for a development permit for the site with three variances in January 2020.
Originally the city’s design panel was scheduled to look at the application in March 2020, the month the pandemic was declared, but that meeting was cancelled.
Instead, a letter was sent to the applicant including staff comments, staff said, and the applicant responded with design revisions including changes to lighting, improved pedestrian connections and enhanced landscaping around the site’s perimeter.
The variances would allow the developer to reduce the sideyard setback on the north property line by nearly two feet and permit one-storey heights, instead of two storeys, for the dealership buildings. The final variance permits the combined fence and retaining-wall height to increase by three feet.
Coun. Tyler Brown expressed concern that the project did not go before the design panel, saying that could have happened in the past year.
Coun. Don Bonner moved that the permit be approved, with councillors Brown and Ben Gelesbracht voting against it.
Coun. Zeni Maartman voted in favour. “When we first approved this going into our first term, I said I wanted something on this land before the four years [of council’s term] was up, so I just hope they can get it built fast,” Maartman said.
