The city’s development appeal board has turned down the Salvation Army’s bid to rebuild a church in the Alberta Avenue neighbourhood.
The Crossroads Community Church, on the corner of 95th Street and 117th Avenue, has been closed for years.
And for years the Salvation Army has wanted to redevelop and reopen the building.
On Thursday, advocates for the project and residents opposed to it appeared before the city to argue their cases.
Joanne Coleman lives a few houses away from the site. She told the board she’s tired of vandalism and the fights, drunks and drug addicts.
“In a perfect world it wouldn’t be like this,” she told CBC News. “But it’s lowering our property values, it’s lowering our quality of life.”
Maj. Danielle Strickland with the Edmonton Salvation Army said the church has tried for the past two years to reach some agreement with the community.
At issue was whether the planned building would rightfully qualify as a church or a social services agency.
“The community that we’re running is not a social service centre, it is a church,” Strickland said. “It always has been. I’m an ordained clergy that’s in charge of running a local church in community.”
But the community didn’t see it that way.
“It was not operating, in our mind, as a church, it was operating as an intensive social service building,” Cris Basualdo, the community league’s development director, told CBC News.
“We had issues of prostitution off the steps, we had issues of drug dealing in the alleys.”
This isn’t the first time this battle has been waged. In October 2013, the community appeared before the same appeal board to argue its case against the project. In that case, also, the city sided with the community.
But the Salvation Army reapplied after that decision.
On Friday morning, the development board issued a verbal decision, saying the project can’t go ahead.
Their decision is not binding until the written decision, including reasons for it, is released on April 24.
