Development of the former tank farm site between Valleyview and Hillcrest is back on the burner – the front burner.

The Vancouver firm of the Golder Group of Companies has organized a series of meetings next week among officials representing the Yukon government, the Ta'an Kwach'an Council and the Kwanlin Dun First Nation.

Golder is representing Mike Mickey, the owner of the 57-hectare site.

"And we're going to have a public open house Wednesday, May 30 from 5:00 to 7:30,” Kari Dow, an urban planner with Golder, explained this morning from her Vancouver office.

"What we are trying to do is put some work on the front end to get a really strong neighbourhood vision for the site, and from there we can use that as our jumping-off point,” she said.

Dow said restoration of the 140 acres to allow for redevelopment is the primary focus right now.

Whether the project can clear the required environmental screening and other regulatory requirements in time to begin the cleanup this year is something of an unknown, she said.

The area served as a tank farm for White Pass to store fuel that it pumped through a pipeline from the Port of Skagway to Whitehorse.

Mickey obtained the property in the late 1990s as White Pass was selling off several parcels of real estate.

The Yukon government declared the site contaminated last year, after the National Energy Board released it from under its thumb once it determined through a lengthy review that it had been cleaned to a level suitable for industrial use.

Plans by the late Brad Taylor, who had an arrangement with Mickey to develop the tank farm into a residential neighbourhood, met with constant resistance from the Yukon government.

The government maintained the site was not cleaned to a level suitable for residential development.

Taylor, however, insisted the government was being unnecessarily unreasonable, and that it didn't even want to entertain suggestions how development could proceed safely, just as it has in other parts of Canada under similar circumstances.

Perhaps, Taylor went so far as to suggest, the Yukon government just didn't want any competition in the business of developing residential land.

In a brief interview this morning, Mickey said he has assured the government the site will be cleaned to a point where the government will find it suitable for mixed use, including residential housing.

He indicated more details will be available next week once the meetings among representatives of the different governments have been held and information is put forward at the open house for the public.

"I think definitely part of this project is an integrated redevelopment and restoration strategy,” Dow said.

"These two things really go hand-in-hand. You can't do redevelopment until you do restoration and it seems like Mickey is very interested in that.”

Dow said the project will include a full screening by the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board.

"We have had a preliminary meeting with Environment Yukon and from those meetings I think we can come up with something that works for both parties,” she said.

Taylor was pursuing the idea of a something akin to a gated community, with some 300-plus housing lots.