British businessman Harold S. Geneen, often credited with coining the phrase “paralysis by analysis” once said leadership is “practised not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.”
St. Albert residents all know the current city council has the attitude. But do they have the leadership ability to back up the attitude with action? The question is raised because of what some downtown business owners say is a lack of progress in the city's downtown development plan.
Those owners, if they have lived in St. Albert for any period of time, should know that things move painfully slow around here. So slow at times that one could almost think Geneen was speaking of St. Albert when he first mentioned “paralysis by analysis.”
And it's not just this council.
No long-time St. Albert resident will ever forget the 30-year saga of the west regional road, eventually named Ray Gibbon Drive when it finally opened in 2007. It took so long that former councillor and mayor Ray Gibbon, a strong proponent of the west bypass road from the time it was first raised in 1977, died in 1999, eight years before it opened.
Then there's Servus Credit Union Place. The idea of a multi-use recreational centre was proposed back in the mid-1970s but it wasn't until four decades later it became a reality.
And it took a concerted and aggressive campaign by local sports groups to finally get it approved in a 2004 plebiscite – by a narrow margin with only 44 per cent of eligible voters casting ballots.
By the time the construction was underway the junior hockey Saints, who had been begging council for a number of years to provide them with a suitable arena, had left town.
So it shouldn't come as any surprise to local businessmen that two years after council approved its grandiose $135-million Downtown Area Redevelopment Plan, little action has taken place.
Nolan Crouse is at least the third mayor to try to turn those several blocks into a meaningful and lively downtown. Richard Plain led a council in the mid-'70s that created a plan that moved residents out of the area, realigned St. Anne Street to its current curvilinear route and began plans for a new city hall. But they failed to entice a developer and turned away local business people who wanted to build.
In the 1980s then-mayor Richard Fowler called the vacant downtown lands the “moose pasture” and his council created a new development plan. It slowly led towards commercial development but not of the retail and entertainment type that could attract the critical mass to create the lively downtown council envisioned.
St. Albert isn't alone there. Many major cities, including Edmonton, have struggled for decades to bring life to their downtown cores. The problem is usually finding the right catalyst. Edmonton may have found its man in Daryl Katz and his new arena.
St. Albert hasn't found its catalyst and may never do so. Downtown will never be a Whyte Avenue, but with the right leadership and the right plans, it could provide a lot more life than it offers these days.
But at a price of $135 million? While the thinking may be that it's time St. Albert just got on with it, council and taxpayers do have to think hard about whether they're really willing to take that $135-million gamble. Perhaps this is not the time to stop being the tortoise.
