All talk and no action makes downtown dull

Downtown Halifax is suffering death by study, while in Moncton they're actually spending millions of dollars on new infrastructure and improvements.

Mayor Peter Kelly and our regional councillors have mired progress with an endless parade of public consultations, task forces, roundtables, committees and consultants' reports. They lurch from producing one strategy to the next, without ever stopping to spend the money needed to make a plan happen.

It's all talk and no action.

"The priorities haven't been set, so everything just kind of gets put off another year, another year, another year," laments Paul MacKinnon, executive director of the Downtown Halifax Business Commission.

At Tuesday's council meeting, MacKinnon presented an appalling statistic: the city has invested only $1.5 million on capital projects in downtown Halifax over the past six years.

Blame it on a mayor who wants to chair meetings, rather than lead a city, and councillors for whom co-operating toward the greater good takes a back seat to parochial bickering. In their eyes, investment in the downtown somehow takes funds away from their districts.

The downtown is the economic and cultural heart of our city and province. But it is stalled and stagnant.

"You have to sufficiently invest in the downtown. That's your best investment, and that's where you're going to reap the most reward," MacKinnon said yesterday. "The investment you make here has ramifications and positive spinoffs for everyone else's community."

Building a successful downtown attracts new residents and business. That means more tax revenue for the general coffers, which benefits the municipality as a whole.

In 2000, council created a Capital District task force to place more emphasis on downtown Halifax, Dartmouth and Bedford. But they haven't received a big enough budget to produce significant benefits.

Council commissioned and adopted an economic strategy in October 2005. It reinforced the need to invest in the downtown. But the investment never came.

Now the city has a massive urban design project underway, which is also stressing the importance of downtown. It follows the regional plan, which called for more population density on the peninsula.

The city has the joint public-lands studies for the George Street-Carmichael Street corridor and the Spring Garden Road and Queen Street areas. It has a study on what to do with the Cogswell Street interchange. It has a study on redesigning Sackville Landing. But council has spent no money to do anything.

From 2001 to 2004, a task force consulted citizens and developed a public facilities needs assessment, which identified such objectives as a new convention centre, performing-arts centre and library. Of course, council never prioritized them, so, lacking a decision on which is most important, the city has proceeded with none.

It gets even more ridiculous. Five years ago, the city financed a "way-finding" study, which aimed to provide signs to help visitors find their way around. It prescribed every detail right down to the design of the signs - even specifying fonts and colours.

"It's all ready to go, except we haven't created the signs and put them up," MacKinnon said.

"There's been no money put into actually doing them."

Meanwhile, in Moncton, the three levels of government have just spent $48 million on a new bridge and two urban bypasses. The city's share was $10 million.

Moncton's mayor and council adopted a downtown vision strategy last year, and now they're putting their money where their mouths are. This year's budget alone includes a new parking garage worth a couple of million bucks, three new fields for football and soccer plus one for softball, $250,000 for a skateboard park, and $50,000 to plant new trees to beautify downtown streetscapes.

"We have the plan, so now we're spending money," said Daniel Allain, executive director of Downtown Moncton Inc.

Allain said there's no lack of political will to make it happen.

"It's the pride, and one of the economic generators, for the whole province," he said. "People certainly realize that what's good for downtown is going to have a positive effect on the other areas."

Not in Halifax, where opportunity continues to pass us by.

drodenhiser@hfxnews.ca

David Rodenhiser thinks part of the problem is the post-amalgamation fiction that every community in HRM is equal and must receive equal treatment. They aren't, and they shouldn't.

Downtown spending

Capital spending in downtown Halifax between 2001 and 2006:

l New sidewalks/street improvements (Lower Water, Duke, George, Sackville): $760,000

- Scotia Square transit terminal: $360,000

- Waterfront upgrades at Chebucto Landing: $100,000

- Poster kiosks: $53,000

- Furniture and bike racks: $50,000

- Landscape design (Lower Water Street bus lay-by; shrub and tree planting): $38,000

- Mural project: $6,000

Source: HRM

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