The lone vote on city council against a land exchange at the former Motorways trucking yard may have been different had council earlier been given the information it received on the matter last night.

'Had I heard that before and I knew exactly what they were talking about, it might have changed my mind,' Coun. Doug Graham said in an interview following Tuesday night's council meeting.

Graham voted against third reading of a bylaw for a land exchange in the Motorways site downtown.

The land will see lots on the site exchanged between the city and territory. The lot the city will give to the territory is planned to be transferred to the Kwanlin Dun First Nation as part of its land claim selection.

In a presentation prior to the vote, Dermot Flynn, the associate chief negotiator with the territory's land claims secretariat, told council there are a number of benefits for the city from the deal.

Kwanlin Dun, for example, has pulled back the boundary of its settlement land at the bottom of Two Mile Hill so the city would have room to extend its bike path, Flynn said.

It will also mean an improved route for the proposed Hamilton Boulevard extension to a Kwanlin Dun settlement land parcel, and access across settlement land in Copper Ridge so the city can use a snow dump.

Among those improvements will be a better route for First Avenue, a provision for a public walkway at the north end of the Kwanlin Dun parcel, and a route for the trolley through a road right-of-way rather than through city property.

'All of these arrangements were (made) and became part of the discussion around this land exchange proposal,' Flynn said, urging council members not to consider the land exchange in isolation.

'The proposed new configuration was arrived at after many months of hard work and discussion among the city, Kwanlin Dun and the Yukon government,' Flynn said.

However, there were parts of the plan Graham said he was not aware of. An example is the land available for the bike trail on the south side of Two Mile Hill.

'What it appears to me is that Kwanlin Dun is making a real effort to compromise, you know,' he said. 'And it's just unfortunate that we didn't know about it, that's for sure, because I might have been willing to compromise too.'

Graham pointed out that with the exchange, the city is getting a piece of land the downtown trolley will eventually run through.

'So we're not going to sell that chunk of property,' he said.

The other section the city will get from the exchange will enable it to align First Avenue.

'That, to me, is absolutely no reason to do it,' he argued.

The city gave up $350,000 worth of property it could have sold with a business placed there that may have been very valuable to the city, Graham said.

'We don't have any land we can sell,' he argued. 'And we have nothing in return that we can sell or utilize or, you know, there's nothing.'

With the land exchange in place, the settlement land will be ready to be transferred from the territory to the Kwanlin Dun First Nation on the April 1 deadline which fell under the land claim agreement.