University of Ottawa buys Algonquin college’s Lees campus

The University of Ottawa is seeing so much growth that it is buying the former Lees Avenue campus of Algonquin College despite concerns over pollution at the site.
The university is buying the campus — several low-rise buildings on 15 acres near the Rideau River — for $7 million, which is $2 million less than the college initially asked for the property in 2002. The deal is to close next week.
David Mitchell, the university’s vice-president of communications, said the purchase will allow the school to keep growing in the central area of the city after years of expansion at its main Sandy Hill campus.
The Algonquin site, formerly called the Rideau Campus, has classroom, laboratory and office space, as well as sports and kitchen facilities. Algonquin facilities and operations manager Udo Friesen says the site is a “fully functional small college campus,” which can accommodate about 3,000 people. The university will do some renovations to the buildings before occupying the site, perhaps as soon as next year. Potential uses include everything from research labs to intramural sports, classrooms and storage. The five buildings constitute 221,000 square feet of space.
But the university, with its main campus in Sandy Hill, is really looking at the site for its long-term potential, since much of the land is not built upon. It’s one of the few downtown pieces of land that’s available near the university’s main campus and the property stretches down to the Rideau River, Mr. Mitchell noted.
“We’re bursting at the seams. We’re really a landlocked campus,” said Mr. Mitchell. “We have the canal on one side, we have Sandy Hill on our other side, the Queensway at our south end and downtown Ottawa at our north end. So there’s no more room for expansion on our already very densely developed downtown campus.
“We have an opportunity to build for the future, for the generations ahead,” said Mr. Mitchell. “We’ve had our eye on the property for some time.”
The University of Ottawa has seen a building boom in the last decade, with several prominent, large buildings constructed on its main campus, and expansions also at the health sciences campus on Smyth Road. The university has 10,000 more students today than it had 10 years ago. It currently has 37,500 students.
The university had looked at the college property a few years ago and backed off from a purchase because of concerns about the need for environmental cleanup.
That area had been the site of industrial operations, including gas produced from coal, which created a coal-tar byproduct that was stored nearby and leaked into the Rideau River in the 1980s. As well, the college property was once a landfill site. The former Ottawa-Carleton regional government put in a treatment system for groundwater to end the pollution of the Rideau and tests have shown that worked.
Mr. Mitchell acknowledged that contamination of the property at Lees Avenue is a concern. He said there will have to be some soil remediation. But he said the university has studied the contamination issue “very, very carefully,” with expert help, and is satisfied the pollution problem “is very manageable.”
The Algonquin site is one of many brownfield sites — properties that are contaminated by old industrial uses — that the City of Ottawa is keen to see redeveloped so that they generate new life and taxes in older neighbourhoods. It’s also right next to a transit station, so considered an ideal location as a centre for employment and study.
The Lees Avenue site is within walking distance of the university’s main campus, but there will be shuttle bus service to connect the campuses.
Algonquin hasn’t used the Rideau campus for several years and the college has been leasing the property over the past three years to a television production company, which has been filming in the buildings. That firm has been advised to vacate the premises.