Harvest Hills residents take golf course redevelopment fight to city hall

Harvest Hills residents opposed to a plan to turn a golf course into a housing development will get a chance to speak at city hall Monday.

The golf course in the northeast Calgary suburb was sold to Cedarglen Homes in 2014.

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Since then, thousands of people have been fighting an application to rezone the greens to allow a 716-unit housing development.

"Residents in this area have not had the voice that they should," said Rick Lundy, president of the Northern Hills Community Association. "They are going to come out in full because this application isn't healthy for our community."

Monday marks their first chance to influence council's decision, he said.

"This is not a complete community. We are infrastructure-starved up here. We're lacking in schools, we're lacking in medical services, human services, we're lacking in recreation and we're going to add thousands more people to this community? It makes no sense."

'Good job of engagement'

A big neighbourhoodturnout at the council meetingwouldn't be surprising, said Chris Ollenberger, a spokesperson for Quantum Place Developments, a companyhired to help the homebuilder.

"It is a big change for the neighbourhood so I'm not surprised to see it. I think we have done a good job of engagement," he said.

"Not only did we consult with the community in Northern Hills, but the City of Calgary also did its own completely separate engagement program and tried to incorporate as much input as possible into the application from both of those sources of feedback."

That includes having new single family homes near existing homes and more than twice the green space of typical neighbourhoods, he said.

"That actually came as part of the community feedback. They wantedadequate buffers between the houses as possible."

But resident Lesley Cooney-Burk said the developer hasn't listened to the community's concerns, like keeping mature trees, burying electrical wires and creating a large buffer zone between new and older housing.

"When we say we don't want this development, they just dismiss that and say, 'It's going to happen anyway, what do you want?'" she said. "We list the things that we want and they ignore them."

Northern Hills Community Association recently filed a complaint through the city's whistleblower program over how administration dealt with the file.

Jim Stevenson, the area councillor, plans to publicly ask cityadministration for clarity.

"I'll have them address a number of different things that have been part of these complaints the whistleblower complaint and so on so that we get that on the table right off the start."

Stevenson says a decision will hopefully be made by the end of the day.