City to repair Somerset House itself?

Alayne McGregor

The City of Ottawa is considering just fixing Somerset House itself.

At the city’s Built Heritage Subcommittee on March 8, Heritage Planning Branch Program Manager Lesley Collins said the city is looking at options to have existing orders to repair the building enforced. That includes “the possibility of the city undertaking the work and charging the owner through the tax roll.”

The landmark heritage building at the corner of Bank and Somerset Streets suffered a partial cave-in in 2007, and has been sitting vacant and boarded up since as the owner and the city continue to debate its fate.

Somerset Ward Councillor Catherine McKenney told the meeting that Somerset House is “the most egregious example of heritage neglect in this city.” They said the owner was “pulling us around by our noses, and making a mockery of City Hall in terms of the applications and the plans for this property.”

Collins said the building has had an outstanding property standards order (to conserve its heritage aspects) since 2018. The owner has been charged with non-compliance with the order, and that matter is still before the courts. The next court hearing was scheduled for March 17, after The BUZZ went to print.

“In the meantime the building continues to deteriorate,” Collins said.

Late last year, the owner submitted engineering reports to the city’s Building Code Services advising that the building was unsafe and needed to be demolished. “The city had a peer review of these reports undertaken by an engineer who specializes in heritage buildings. The peer review found that while there are several urgent items that needed to be addressed, the building did not require immediate demolition,” she said.

She said that, as a result of the review, further orders were issued under the Building Code Act requiring both immediate and short-term structural stabilization measures to ensure public safety.

At this point, city staff are a) continuing to pursue legal action, b) trying to get the owner to undertake the repair orders, and c) discussing potential development plans for the site with the owner, Collins said.

Roger Chapman, the city’s director of By-Law and Regulatory Services, told the meeting that city staff would prefer to see the prosecution proceed before contracting out the repairs because the repairs would be a “significant cost” – as much as half a million dollars.

He said he was “really concerned with scope creep on this one. We don’t know what we’ll find when we start peeling back layers on this structure.”

However, if the court case continues to be delayed and the owner doesn’t undertake the repairs, he said the city could go ahead and contract the repairs and charge that cost back through property taxes.

McKenney said they believed the property should be expropriated, “because it is a key intersection in our downtown and it is a building that is worth saving.” They argued that the city could make “if not a significant economic profit from it, a social profit from it” by using it for housing or even a branch library.

“There’s so much potential for that corner.”