The $135.8-million downtown area redevelopment plan (DARP) is a vague, overly-expansive document that needs to be trashed so city hall can start working on an affordable, focused plan that aims to accomplish what this one does not — getting people downtown.
This umpteenth iteration of a plan to make downtown work, besides being atrociously expensive, doesn’t ignore the residential variable that will ultimately determine downtown’s growth, but fails to address it as rigorously as required. The mantra of “build and they will come” does not apply to a sprawling plan that will eat up more capital funding than any councillor or St. Albert taxpayer is comfortable spending.
By getting more people downtown, we’re not referring just to residents visiting the downtown area — we mean actually getting people to live downtown or adjacent to it. It will be those individuals and their desire for closer amenities that will help propel the needed retail changes on Perron Street and the surrounding area. This plan does not make that a priority. The first steps are studies on parking, servicing and stormwater management and a pedestrian, cycling and transit study. The first projects are narrowing Perron Street and widening the sidewalk, re-aligning St. Anne Street to swing past TachĂ© Street before connecting to Sir Winston Churchill Avenue and building a civic square and parkade. There is no emphasis on creating a larger residential footprint in the downtown area.
The vision for downtown is typically compared with Old Strathcona or 124 Street in Edmonton. But walk around either area and there are rows of multi- or single-family units on either side of both streets. Yet St. Albert faces a quandary in that what housing used to exist has long since been torn down and what does exist is too far away or too limited to create enough residential foot traffic for the area. The most recent and possibly best proposal for getting more people downtown is Amacon’s proposed redevelopment of Grandin mall. Yet Amacon has been virtually silent about the project since placing it on the back burner during the recent recession.
Providing more public meeting places and amenities is all well and good, but how do we justify the costs of building a civic square, a promenade or an amphitheatre when our climate would only allow their use for four to five months every year? Is there a plan, much like the legislature building or Edmonton City Hall, to incorporate a fountain/wading pool in summer and an ice rink in winter? That would help. But this is a city that can’t decide what to do with its own public lands. They may be shown as colours on a map, but council hasn’t made long-term plans for important sites like the Hemingway Centre, seniors’ club or the under-utilized Millennium Park. In the mix are questions about a new downtown library, administration offices and city-owned parking.
Restricting street-level space to retail is a laudable goal, but we’ve had similar restrictions in place in the past and we still have a downtown with professional services on ground floors because there is not enough foot traffic for a retailer to make enough money to justify locating there. That is where residential planning comes in. Get more people living in the area and businesses will move in uninhibited to satisfy their retail needs. That will generate the necessary momentum to get more individuals to spend time downtown.
Council does not need to take any action on this plan. It can toss it into the nearest recycling bin and try again, but this time concentrating on developing a plan with more attainable, specific goals that will encourage downtown living and residential expansion. We as a city have been through numerous plans to fix what we believe is wrong with downtown. We should keep trying until we get it right.
