Capital Daily for Thursday, June 18

The former downtown Y was supposed to keep Victoria swimming while Crystal Pool gets torn down this fall. Instead, a broken water line in a third-floor utility closet flooded all three floors of the Broughton Street building on Monday, and the city now isn't sure the site will work at all.

The leak ran for two to four hours before staff caught it, the city's director of parks and recreation, Derrick Newman, told reporters at city hall on Wednesday. By then water was two to three inches deep on each floor, cascading down stairwells and soaking through walls and ceilings.

None of the planned summer upgrades to convert the building had started yet. The city has begun its insurance process and is hiring a third-party remediation firm before it can say what the cleanup costs, or whether the building is still a viable stand-in.

That's the catch. Crystal Pool is the city's only public pool, drawing up to 1,500 visits a day, and its replacement on Quadra Street is a five-to-six-year build. Without the Y, there's no obvious place for those swimmers to go.

Council voted on the Quadra-McKenzie Plan at 11-something Tuesday night, after a public hearing that ran five and a half hours and produced dozens of speakers who disagreed about almost everything.

Some residents said the plan crammed in too much density. Others said it didn't go far enough. A few wanted it scrapped. Over three years, the district collected more than 17,000 pieces of feedback, and Tuesday added another pile to the heap.

The document had already been sanded down repeatedly. Towers once pitched at 24 storeys were cut to 12 or 18. Streets near Tattersall Drive earmarked for six-storey apartments dropped to townhouses. Mayor Dean Murdock kept stressing what the plan doesn't do: it doesn't change land use, it only flags where rezoning might one day make sense.

The sharpest objection came from the Songhees First Nation, who'd asked Saanich to hold off pending real consultation over a Garry oak ecosystem. Council didn't postpone. Instead it amended the plan to add a goal of restoring ecosystems and working with Indigenous communities on Garry oak restoration. Councillors Nathalie Chambers and Judy Brownoff voted no anyway.