A business owner who rents her property from Kelowna City said she lost thousands of dollars to a broken HVAC system.
On Chapman Parkade, Danielle Cross, a third level sommelier and senior wine instructor, opened a sustainable wine bar called Buvez.
In the few years since it opened, Cross has used her international knowledge and experience in the hospitality industry to design the bar.
In April, one in three HVAC units started making noise before it eventually failed. Cross said the breakdown made work nearly impossible during the intermittent hot flashes in May and June.
“What the city told me is completely absurd,” she said.
Cross said it took the city more than a month to get back to her about the utility maintenance before informing her that the part she needed was no longer being manufactured. There was a wall erected by a previous tenant making the unit inaccessible to service and the city did not have enough money to replace the refrigerator in their kitchen until April 2020.
Instead, according to Cross, they offered a temporary unit that would have crowded the cooking area, which wasn’t a viable option.
“Your complete mismanagement of resources is overwhelming,” she told Cross.
But according to Mike Olson, Managing Property Manager for the City of Kelowna, it was less a mishandling of resources than an unexpected malfunction in the HVAC system as it was supposed to last a year longer.
“We planned to replace them all,” he said, noting that the building is old and that mandatory updates have been planned several years in advance. “It’s unfortunate that it took her so long and I sympathize with her.”
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Cross claims she lost thousands of dollars in revenue in May and June; Months that should be your most profitable. On fine days, when people felt like eating and drinking a glass of wine, they had to close because of heat exhaustion and subsequent migraines.
O-Lake Cafe & Bistro, a tenant from the same location, said their HVAC unit was still working and they didn’t have the same issues as Cross.
“This is normal tenant-landlord stuff,” said Olson.
But to Cross, she felt like she was being strangled by the people who were supposed to support her.
“Let Kelowna support small businesses and see what they’re doing to me,” she said.
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Now, the Kelowna City Real Estate and Real Estate Services Department has notified them that they would send someone to find a viable, sustainable solution to the problem.
This could include removing a cooling system from an unoccupied commercial rental unit and replacing it with the defective system in Buvez.
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