A business owner who rents her property from Kelowna City said she lost thousands of dollars to a broken HVAC system. She claims the city is playing shy to replace it.
On Chapman Parkade, Danielle Cross, a sommelier and senior level three wine educator, opened a sustainable wine bar called Buvez.
In the short 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 eventually failing. Cross said the breakdown made working nearly impossible during sporadic 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 in touch with her about the utility maintenance before telling her the part she needed had stopped being made. There was a wall erected by a previous tenant making the unit unserviceable and the city did not have enough money until April 2020 to replace the cooling unit in their kitchen.
Instead, they offered a temporary unit that Cross said would have overcrowded the cooking area, which wasn’t a viable option.
“Your utter mismanagement of resources is mind-boggling,” she told Cross.
However, according to Mike Olson, Managing Property Manager for the City of Kelowna, it was less a mismanagement of resources than an unexpected malfunction of the HVAC system as it was supposed to be an extra year.
“We wanted to replace them all,” he said, noting that the building is old and that updates have been planned a few years in advance. “It’s unfortunate that it has taken so long for you and that I feel for you.”
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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 nice days when people wanted to eat something and drink a glass of wine, it 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 weren’t having the same problems as Cross.
“It’s just normal renter-landlord stuff,” said Olson.
But to Cross, she felt like she was being strangled by the people who were supposed to support her.
“Kelowna should support small businesses and see what they do to me,” she said.
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Now, the Kelowna Cross City Real Estate and Real Estate Services Department has announced that they would send someone to look for a viable and sustainable solution to the problem.
This could include taking a cooling system from an unoccupied commercial rental unit and replacing it with the broken system in Buvez.
@davidvenn_
David.venn@kelownacapnews.com
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