The Sunrise Ridge Estates expansion east of the water tower, located on a hill overlooking The Kingsway, has continued inching forward, despite the concerns of area residents.
Most recently, a mailout indicating the plan has changed to include three nine-storey buildings instead of 66 single-family detached dwellings has raised eyebrows.
However, during this week’s planning committee meeting of city council, the city’s elected officials didn’t look at the proposed changes.
Tabled for the meeting was an application to extend the existing draft plan of subdivision by three years to Oct. 29, 2026, which they unanimously approved with minor changes to the previously approved plan.
“There’s a lot of history here,” Ward 12 Coun. Joscelyne Landry-Altmann told Sudbury.com after the meeting, citing a longstanding “back and forth” between the developer, residents and the city.
The subdivision was approved by city council on Oct. 28, 2004. Prior to this week’s meeting, the approval was last extended by the planning committee on Jan. 11, 2021.
The initial 2004 approval was for 152 single detached dwelling lots east of Mont Adam Street, with 86 lots registered thus far, leaving 66 unregistered lots in the draft approved subdivision.
Phase one proceeded, and a 2009 flood incident saw water pour down the hill “like Niagara Falls,” as one area resident described it at the time, and flood the Mountain Street and Leslie Street neighbourhood.
As a 2011 municipal report noted, the Sunrise Ridge Estates development on the hill played a role in the flooding, with approximately eight per cent of the original drainage area which originally flowed south to The Kingsway “included or diverted to the Mountain Street drainage area.”
Approximately 60 per cent of the development’s grading was completed in 2009, and a large stormwater control pond was constructed.
“While the pond outlet functions as designed, Mountain Street residents have since July 26, 2009, regularly expressed concern with the volume and noise of stormwater spilling over the mountain face during rainstorms from the Sunrise Ridge pond outlet,” the 2011 report noted.
“Who puts a retention pond above somebody’s head?” Landry-Altmann asked Sudbury.com this week. “Who does that? And that went through.”
Since that time, she added, the stormwater flow issue has been resolved.
“We’ve removed a great deal of the risk with the construction of the Mountain Street stormwater overflow channel,” city drainage engineer Paul Javor told the planning committee in 2021, since which time the city also purchased affected homes on Mountain Street to be torn down.
Stormwater management work, including decommissioning an overflow channel, was done at a cost of $511,236, which the city planned on recuperating from the developer at a cost of $511,236, or $7,746 per lot for the remaining 66 lots yet to be constructed.
In 2012, SalDan Developments applied to construct 77 new housing units, but the planning committee only approved 11 already serviced by the city, bringing the development to its current total of 86 developed lots and 66 to come.
Since that time, the development has been more or less dormant, Landry-Altmann said.
The remaining land to the east of the existing homes, which SalDan Developments plans on building out as part of the next phase, has been adopted by area residents as parkland, she added, noting that they’ve since spotted eastern whip-poor-will birds in the area.
During this week’s meeting, Landry-Altmann argued in favour of retaining a condition the developer satisfies requirements set out under the Endangered Species Act due to the presence of the threatened birds.
During the 2021 extension vote, she introduced a successful amendment to retain the requirement, noting at the time it was being “respectful of the work that was done in 1982 of regreening and reseeding and bringing back life to this area.”
This week, city Strategic and Environmental Planning manager Dr. Stephen Monet said the likelihood of the land serving as habitat for protected species was “low,” which was why he recommended removing the condition, as the city had also done in 2021.
Although the extension passed this week without the Endangered Species Act requirement, Landry-Altmann suggested that area residents should submit evidence of whip-poor-will to the city in order to plead their case.
(Despite this, Monet clarified that the migratory birds’ presence would not necessarily signal it is their territory, nor would it necessarily result in a halt to the development, though further work and approvals through the province would be required.)
While the three-year extension granted this week was for a plan consisting of developing 66 lots for single detached dwelling units, opponents have cautioned that an application has been made to veer significantly away from this plan.
In a notice of application mailed to area residents this month, and which was forwarded by N Field Crescent resident Tanya anne Ball to Sudbury.com this week, it’s noted that the next phase would instead consist of three nine-storey buildings with 108 units each.
The buildings would be located at the ends of Kingsview Drive, Fieldstone Drive and N Field Cres.
“It raised a lot of flags, so the whole neighbourhood is talking about this,” Ball told Sudbury.com after this week’s meeting, which she attended. The meeting included no indication of the nine-storey builds being proposed, which the committee has yet to formally see and vote on.
Sunrise Ridge Drive is the only way in and out of the subdivision, she said, “and an increase in traffic to that level is going to cause a lot of problems.”
Safety, she added, is “a major issue.”
Situated at the top of a hill, she said it’s also a concerning location for nine-storey buildings to be constructed.
“If those buildings went up, it would be quite the sight from all over the city of Sudbury,” she said, adding that they’d be “higher than the water tower.”
The proposal stipulates that each 108-unit building would include 36 affordable units.
Area residents are meeting with the developer next month to learn more about the proposal and to voice their concerns.
This will be followed by a public hearing during a planning committee meeting of city council, at which Bell said she anticipates a number of residents will come forward to voice concerns during their allotted time.
Sudbury.com reached out to the City of Greater Sudbury for better clarity on what has been done to mitigate the flood risk coming off the Sunrise Ridge Estates hill, as well as to receive the full document provided to area residents which include details about the three nine-storey buildings proposed. This story will be updated in the event a response is received.
Sudbury.com also reached out to SalDan Developments for additional insight on the project, and received the following response after this story was initially published:*
"We have been building in the neighbourhood and throughout the city since 1992 and have proven ourselves to be a quality builder who delivers a quality product, and we want to help address the current housing crisis by building more affordable homes for people on the same land. This development would represent the same quality we have been putting forward for the last 30+ years. Aside from that, we respectfully would prefer to address our neighbours than the general public at this time."*
*Editor's note: These paragraphs were added after this story was initially published, as more information became available.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
