Ah, Nolan Crouse. St. Albert’s mayor is serving up another of his “ideas,” this one aimed at solving parking woes in the downtown.
Crouse gets a lot of flack in some circles for his zany schemes, like wanting downtown revitalization or going to bat for the city as a place to invest and challenging city hall’s bureaucratic culture. But this time he’s gone too far. His Worship wants to fix downtown parking woes by using a … parkade — and not a new one on the public dime, but a structure that already exists. Talk about insanity.
In all seriousness, Crouse does take his lumps for some of his hands-on schemes, like wanting to be St. Albert’s unofficial drug czar or banning RVs from Walmart parking lots. But this time, St. Albert should thank the good mayor for trying to find a workable solution to the downtown parking crunch that’s annoying to library and city hall visitors, shoppers, farmers’ market-goers and business owners alike.
It sounds simple enough: use the 240-stall parkade at Grandin mall. Crouse took it upon himself to start talks with the mall’s owners, Amacon, about opening the parkade to the public for special events and to city staff for weekday parking. Parking in front of the mall itself would still be a no-go, but having access to the parkade would help prevent the park-ageddon chaos of farmers’ market Saturdays and free up stalls that city staff use in the central parking lot across from St. Albert Place.
It’s a far, far better option than the palm-to-the-face plan cooked up by city administration. Their idea? Pave over Millennium Park for a 110-stall parking lot and look at adding another 40 pay stalls on a plot of city land on St. Thomas Street. That’s right, their plan is for the Botanical Arts City to pave over paradise and put up a pair of temporary parking lots — all for a permanent $900,000. Is city hall actually trying to set up St. Albert to look like a laughingstock? I can see our new slogan now: “St. Albert, the Botanical Arts City. And now free parking!”
Millennium Park might not be the best-used park in St. Albert — it’s essentially a stretch of grass you pass while walking to and from the Children’s Bridge or sometimes cut through on the way to city hall. But it is a valuable piece of land in the river valley, a spot where the downtown area redevelopment plan (DARP) envisions a promenade, cultural square and outdoor amphitheatre that could double as a skating rink in the winter. DARP does not call for another surface parking lot.
Ideas like these put the silly in silly hall, especially when administration is partly to blame for the parking crunch in the first place. Faced with a desire to attract more downtown businesses and little on-street parking, planners have allowed new businesses to rely on spaces in the central parking lot to meet city parking stall requirements. But as any daytime visitor to downtown knows, there’s just not enough to go around.
Clearly, the old Grandin parkade is not a long-term fix. Even if people figure out there is a parkade tucked away there, it’s too far on the fringe to be used by casual visitors of the library, city hall or businesses. And as much as some residents would like to make city staffers walk four miles uphill both ways in a snowstorm to a parking lot, that’s not an ideal solution either. A centrally located parkade – preferably not built with public dollars – is the ideal, but whether it’s economically feasible is another matter.
For now, there’s only one response to this parking strategy: sod off.
Bryan Alary is a former city hall reporter and editor.
