IT will not result in the closing of the downtown branch right now, but give it about a year or so. I am so glad the city council has confirmed thier desire to ensure the downtown core goes down hill and we all move out west. Urban sprawl is offically out of control in PG and even though it was not in our OCP, it has worked out that way.

Aw so what! If you were in charge of the Royal Bank would you send your employees to the down town?

Back to city council for a variance? Really, who would have thought it was so important to keep banks small that the city has a regulation?

I bet Brian thinks it is important to keep banks from getting too big! What a waste of time. No wonder we have the people we have on city council.

Well I wish that city council would just come out and say it " Yes we screwed up and continue to screw up the planning of this city" and give up on the parade of them saying they support downtown. Mr. Mayor, where is the downtown condo's that you so hyped during the election, so much so you didn't even invite any of the other members of council to the news conference, cause you wanted to be seen as the one who brought it to town. Two years later and still nothing done. I am so glad you are retiring and not returning to City Council this next election.

Dont for a minute think that the Mayor is retiring. I expect that he will run for Mayor again.

His achilles heel will be the Cameron St. Bridge that he will deliver 5 years late, at a cost of millions.

He will want to be around for the 2010 Olympics, and to host the World Winter Mayors Conference, plus some other perks.

Of course if there is any indication that he will lose the election then I expect that he will retire and leave on a high note, hopefully this will be the case.

It's a good thing we spent all that time and money updating the zoning bylaws.

Now we can ignore it one project at a time.

How Prince George of us.

"His achilles heel will be the Cameron St. Bridge..."

Really? Perhaps we will all be witnessing a grandiose renaming ceremony upon its completion.

Councillor Krause gets his wish anyway. The whole downtown will be dedicated to the derelicts and homeless. We will have to build a few more shelters. Build it and they will come....from everywhere.

It is amazing how often people here do not read for content.

The statement is: "The Royal would like to build a new branch that would be 424 square metres, which, WHEN COMBINED WITH AN EXISTING FINANCIAL SERVICE ON THE SITE, EXCEEDS THE ALLOWABLE."

The Royal is not exceeding the size. A 4,500 square foot operation is not going to create the Royal�s main branch in this community such as the BMO did when they created a building on Central and 15th which is probably about 12,000 square feet in size. There was the culprit that should not have happened if one is worried about offices moving from downtown.

The Z8 zone, where this branch is likely to reside, states that the combined maximum gross floor area of office, financial service, and health service is 500m2 for each site. A typical branch bank, for instance, has about 3,000 square feet.

The box store development on the corner of Domano and Hwy 16 has taken on a life all of its own. Businesses want to be there and the more there are there the more it will become successful. There is nothing that prevents banks from opening up branches all over the city. One cannot force all branches to be downtown in one single or multiple locations.

I see the Z8 zone as being poorly written. A dental office (they are typically not downtown), an insurance office (many are in local community plazas) and a bank (there are branches all over the city with all but one having their local head office downtown) will hit the magic mark of 500m2 easily.

Do we really want to scatter all banks who want to have branch operations in College Heights all over the place? The Z8 zoning as currently written does that remarkably well and probably unintentionally.

I would hope that people from out of town will not be forced to find out where their favourite bank has a branch near the stores they drove 100km to shop in, drive over to that bank and drive to their stores after that. What a waste of gas and duplication of parking spaces.

I am waiting for the day when we will get some real smart growth in this community and get someone wishing to build a fairly dense residential precinct close to the shopping node.

Next time people on here are in Kelowna, drive around a bit in the southern part of that city to see how nicely the residential subdivisions are clustered around shopping and office nodes in fairly dense fashion. Several of them have multi storey offices (3 to 5 floors, lets say) allowing some people the luxury to live quite close to work and cutting down on the daily commute to centre town for office workers. Corporate offices moving away from downtown in major cities has been the case for decades. It will likely be coming to an interior BC town near to you soon. Think of the old Northwood office and the old Canfor office. Think of Rustad. Think of Carrier. Carrier�s office is off Hwy 96 in the BCR, but not on their mill site. They could be downtown, but aren�t.

Then think of the health unit in Meadows school �� now there is another story.

So, let�s look at the facts of life and work with it to see whether that is actually worse than sending everyone downtown for maximum travel distance or not. I think Kelowna has a very valid approach.

I think they just need the floorspace to harbor a bigger vault to hold all of their record profit money.

As for the downtown, look at the plaque in front of the Ramada (an ironic place to put it for sure). For 20 years they have been "revitalizing" the downtown. I'd say the project failed.

So far, they have accomplished turning skid row into E. Hastings St.

The planters around the Ramada all have steel plates bolted to the top of them now, to keep street people from sitting and loitering, camping, setting up homestead on the street corner...

Downtown is dead...stick a fork in it and move on. Throwing money at an unsolvable issue is not going to solve it.

We missed our chance when we located UNBC up on the hill...put it downtown and VOILA we wouldn't be talking about downtown revitalization now.

UNBC downtown, eh? And have all the street people lounging around on UNBC property so that the City does not have to take care of it.

Nice try.

I am very familiar with two downtown universities in Canada, U of Ottawa and U of Toronto. If you look at the perimeter of what happens around both of them you would see that they really have little influence over the downtown other than providing some nice public spaces which very few non-students enter. The main influence in the case of U of T is that those students who are from out of town, which are very few in both cases, populate the flats which the large houses built in the early 1900's have been turned into.

The majority of students in both cases return to their suburban homes after classes, similar to PG.