Chris Stedile
Rossland News
A recent Red Mountain hotel design has city council agreeing to take a closer look at the city’s building guidelines.
At Monday night’s meeting council decided to approve the building permit for a new hotel going up at the local ski hill. Several amendments had been made over the past months at the request of previous council and while some are not satisfied entirely, they believe the hotel will be a nice addition to the resort.
“We have design guidelines we really hope people will follow,” said Mayor Kathy Moore, “We’re trying to keep form and character to these commercial buildings.”
“The design for this building didn’t really meet those guidelines, so the last council said, ‘wait a second, you can do a little better than this, so go back and change some things.’ There wasn’t anything dramatic, just a few changes to try and make it fit in a little better.”
The company in charge of designing this building then returned after making some changes and the current council approved last night.
Moore said for this particular case, “It comes down to personal opinion, I don’t mind it myself, the hotel is going to be great and really nice.”
She continued, “The real impact of that discussion is, what are we going to do about situations like this in the future?”
Nothing is going to be done this time around because it’s far too late in the process, but Moore said being pro-active and making a stand before things get far along is the key to keeping Rossland’s design consistent and attractive to all.
“We’re not going to put a stick in the whole works, but going forward we’re thinking, how can we get people that want to come and invest in our community and kind of buy into the vision that we have for the community to do so?”
“At the same time,” Moore said, “we don’t want to be some cookie cutter, everyone looks like an alpine chalet. That’s not what we’re trying to do.”
The Mayor mentioned that there’s an interesting balance between those things and she thinks what needs to happen is for council to take a closer look at their own guidelines and ask themselves if they in fact, believe in them.
“If we don’t, how do we change them and if we do, how do we make sure people who come in actually buy into them?,” she asked. “It needs to start earlier, not when the design is done. We don’t want to be hard on developers but on the same token we don’t want to sell out what we consider to be a suitable aesthetic for Rossland.”