The city should consider keeping four-storey building height limits, permitting hotels to continue to operate on the highway and housing complexes in older downtown residential areas, council has heard.

At their weekly meeting Monday evening, members of council heard from senior planner Zo' Morrison.

After reviewing a flood of comments coming from a public hearing on amending the Official Community Plan (OCP), she told council, Downtown Plan recommendations have changed.

'We heard from a number of people. We received 35 letters and 12 people spoke at the public hearing. We've also received a lot of input since then,' Morrison said.

At the public hearing in late March, council heard from residents on a number of issues detailed in a proposed OCP amendment, including:

removing the possibility of new multi-family construction from the downtown residential area lining the escarpment between the Pioneer Cemetery and Cook Street and bordered by Sixth Avenue;

permitting eight-storey buildings and removing tourist accommodation zoning from the Alaska Highway and in certain areas of downtown; and

changing zoning so the Family Hotel and Westmark Klondike Inn would be non-conforming (meaning hotel owners would not have the authorization to rebuild in the case of a fire).

Morrison said after reviewing the most recent public comments on the plan, her department is recommending a few changes.

In line with public comments, she said, the planning department is recommending council continue to permit applications for multi-family buildings such as townhouses and apartments in Old Town.

'There were many comments on this amendment,' she said. 'People who live there want to see the single-family nature of the neighbourhood maintained. There were also lots of people who wanted to see development.'

She said her department wants to see new construction in the neighbourhood and feels this would be one way to have that happen as current lot prices in the area could discourage developers.

'We want to see policies that promote redevelopment. We recommend removing this amendment and continue to allow conditional multi-family development in this area.'

Morrison said after hearing from members of the public on lifting the city's current four-storey height restrictions to eight storeys, the planning department is reversing that recommendation to council.

'A lot of people feel the four storeys says something special about Whitehorse. Most of the input we heard was opposed to the taller buildings.

'At this point, we recommend to remove this amendment and have a look at it again when we review the OCP in 2008,' Morrison said.

Plans to remove tourism accommodation from commercial service zoning designations have also been scrapped.

The plan met with opposition from highway hotel owners, Steve Leonard, the vice-president of Westmark Hotelss, and the representatives of the Family Hotel.

'The intention of this was to encourage development downtown,' Morrison said. 'It's a lot cheaper and easier to build on an empty lot on the highway.

'Our recommendation is to remove this amendment to retain tourism accommodation as an allowable use in this designation,' she said.

Other recommendations, according to council documents, include permitting stand-alone residential dwellings (homes that do not have to be above a commercial property) on the riverfront, and taking density numbers of the Downtown Plan's official map.

Coun. Dave Stockdale said while he agrees with the recommendations he's hearing, he takes exception to the notion that council had recommended going to eight storeys in the first place.

Stockdale said while he remembered discussions over eight storeys by the council headed by former mayor Ernie Bourassa, he doesn't recall a council endorsement of taller buildings in Whitehorse.

'I like the recommendations but I have to take issue with saying that council recommended going to eight storeys,' said Stockdale.

Mayor Bev Buckway said she does remember council endorsing the eight-storey idea but feels it's important the public knows there hasn't been 'a lineup of developers' knocking on the doors of city hall over the idea.

Taking highway hotels zoning away was an error that was never intended by council, Buckway added.

'It was also not our intention to put hotels into a non-conforming use.'

Coun. Jan Stick said she feels it's important the public knows discussions are subject to change and that because the OCP is a 'fluid' document, there is nothing that will change indefinitely.

'We're certainly not doing anything in stone at this point.'

Coun. Doug Graham said after sitting on the committees which helped develop the plan, he found it interesting that input from the public during the plan's formation and from the public hearing were different.

'Attitudes change, even the short time this council has been in office, it has been amazing.'

Council is set to vote on the plan next week.