City Council will consider bills to allow Canton highrise
by Jacqueline Watts
The Icon, the controversial high rise hotel-retail-residential development planned by Cignal Corp. for a patch of parking lot on the Canton waterfront, may be on again—this time without the hotel.
City Council President Sheila Dixon notified the Canton Community Association that she would introduce the bill at Monday’s City Council meeting. She took pains to explain in her letter to CCA that she is introducing the bill at the request of the O’Malley administration and that she is opposed to the project herself.
The Icon, at 240 feet high, would be roughly twice the height of the Anchorage Tower, the high-rise condominium building that is currently the tallest on the former industrial waterfront.
Community activists have argued against the Icon development for nearly a year and a half, contending that the land around Boston Street and Lakewood Avenue is already overdeveloped.
CCA reached an agreement with Otis Rolley III, the city’s director of planning, to determine a development plan for the Boston-Lakewood area with a series of meetings, and then reconsider the Icon project.
The Icon project requires two bills: an amendment to the Canton Planned Urban Development, to allow the extra density on the parking lot that Cignal wants to build on; and an amendment to the Canton Urban Renewal Plan, to allow the extra height of the building.
But Rolley requested that Dixon introduce the bills on November 20, long before the series of meetings is over.
The bills were withdrawn, then replaced on the agenda for Dec. 4. The City Council meets biweekly.
Councilman James B. Kraft (D-First) says the developer has asked him several times to introduce the bill and he has refused.
The Icon project and the urban renewal bills will test the old custom of “councilmanic courtesy,” whereby—at least in the old City Council, which had three representatives from each of six districts, instead of 14 single-member districts—members tacitly agreed not to step on each other’s toes, and not to introduce a land-use bill for another member’s district.
The old three-member system allowed a comfortable measure of deniability for unpopular development bills—the three councilmembers in a district simply blamed each other, or they characterized it as a mutual decision reached with difficulty.
With single-member districts, there is only one council member to take responsibility—and there is the possibility that a single member could prevent a development from ever coming before the council. Therefore, a developer has the right to ask a city agency or the Mayor’s office to introduce the legislation.
The Icon bills will be assigned to the Land Use committee, which is chaired by Edward Reisinger (D-10) of South Baltimore.
The community still opposes it—despite losing 55 feet from the height and dropping the hotel idea. “The nature of the project has not changed,” said Steve Strohl, president of CCA. “240 feet is still too tall.”
Kraft says that the on, then off, then on-again development is, most likely, off-again.
“I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” he said. “And the President (Dixon) is clear in her opposition...to the bill.”
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