St. Albert’s latest Downtown Area Redevelopment Plan (DARP) will be five years old before the shovels hit the dirt for its initial, and to be honest, uninspiring first publicly-funded steps next year, when a section of St. Anne Street west of our civic headquarters are moved a mere seven metres to the west. It is easy to see this first change as a waste of $4.1 million. It is equally easy to wonder who will benefit from the change, and if the money couldn’t be better spent elsewhere.
But many downtown merchants, as reported in Saturday’s Gazette, seem to think we do need the changes, because a larger and improved downtown area will likely mean more people spending their money in St. Albert stores. The plan itself is a rather grandiose 85-page document. It looks pretty darned good on paper if strangely European and not entirely realistic.
Go back a few decades, and St. Albert, unlike towns such as Stony Plain, did not have a natural shopping area other than a few stores on St. Anne and Perron streets and the Grandin Shopping Centre. The central blocks was an old residential neighbourhood anchored by the old Bruin Inn, Perron’s grocery store, the Community Hall and the Ducky Dome – St. Albert’s first indoor arena. The initial dream was to remove the housing, build a new City Hall and entice a developer to build a commercial heart for the City including a grocery store, theatre, etc. As it turned out St. Albert Place was built, but no developer shared the rest of the vision and the remaining void became affectionately known as the moose pasture. Later it was graveled then paved for parking.
The next version of the plan is essentially what we have today. The council of the day knocked down the old hockey barn and what was once a lumberyard to create St. Thomas Street and the residential condo strip along Sir Winston Churchill.
The Gazette spoke to one developer, with experience in building suburban centres who says, for the concept to work, citizens, council and business people must be able to agree on a plan and to stick to their guns in implementing it. The costs and the timeline are problems that must be worked out as things develop. It falls upon the civic leaders to meet the challenges and ensure this happens.
One only need to look as far south as Edmonton to see how visionary leadership from both the city and business is transforming that city’s downtown from a dusty parking lot into an urban centre with a new arena, public transportation, museum and all of the accompanying amenities. If it could happen in Edmonton, after several dormant decades, surely it can happen here – if on a much smaller scale. The process has already started.
