To develop or not to develop seemed to be the question most of the public at an open house Wednesday night was answering. Though the people behind a proposed Canadian Tire pointed out that wasn’t really the option since the land in question is already zoned tourist commercial.

“I love Canadian Tire, but this is just not the right location,” one of the roughly 40 people at the Shelly Road Hall said of the Big Tent campground property beside the orange bridge in Parksville.

Jason Maynes, Canadian Tire Real Estate manager, Western Canada, said after two years of looking to build a store at Wembley Mall they started looking at other properties.

“We recognize Parksville as a very valuable market and we’d very much like to be here,” Maynes said. He added that people from the Parksville/Oceanside area spend about $4 million a year in their Nanaimo store so they want to be closer to this market.

Maynes, along with outside planning and development consultant Michael Rosen and Brent Sawchyn with Level Developments, were at the open house to present a proposal to the neighbourhood.

“We’re just here to see what you think of a Canadian Tire in the Big Tent campground site,” Rosen told the group. “Canadian Tire doesn’t want to come into a community if there is no support.”

He said they’re not looking to come to town with hard and fast plans, they want to see what the neighbours think before beginning the formal process with the city.

The presented the basic plan for a 60,000 sq.ft. store which would include a garden centre, auto-service department and Mark’s Work Warehouse, and some suggested solutions to anticipated problems such as a 50 to 60 metre set back from the top of the Englishman River bank and a traffic light at the corner of Martindale and Highway 19A.

Asked about other sites they considered the proponents said they had done extensive research after the Wembley Mall possibility fell through a few years ago, mostly due to what they called the mall owner’s lack of interest.

They said they eliminated all other options, pointing out there are no properties available in the industrial park that are big enough and the empty lot beside the Civic Centre is too far off the highway. They said the Big Tent property is the last large developable property in the city that fits their needs.

They said that since the land is for sale and is zoned tourist commercial, something will be built there, so the neighbours shouldn’t think it’s a question of Canadian Tire or green space, if not the store, there will likely be a hotel built there eventually.

The public members who spoke during the question period were pretty close to unanimously against locating the store in their neighbourhood, though many said they weren’t against the store somewhere in town.

One concerned citizen pointed out that the property in question “is a very tender site,” on the side of the river, near the estuary, in a quiet residential neighbourhood and at what feels like the entrance to town.

Asked what the next step is for the developers, Rosen said “we go for a beer!”

Maynes added that if there is no community support they give up, but if there is even a little support they would come back in the near future for another similar meeting with the neighbourhood and ideas about how they can address their concerns.

If that was successful they would have to go to city council with an OCP amendment application, which would be followed by an application to rezone from tourist commercial to commercial.

As the meeting was breaking up someone from the audience called for a show of hands of people who didn’t want Canadian Tire in that location and over three quarters of the room put their hands up.