By Michael Connors
The pickings were slim but mostly positive when the Downtown Advisory Council got its answers back on downtown revitalization.
The council mailed the survey last month to all 64 candidates running for city council. By the Oct. 25 deadline, only 12 had responded.
The survey asked candidates their opinions on various elements of the city’s downtown revitalization plan. It was part of the advisory council’s strategy for promoting downtown issues in the election.
“That was the whole purpose, for people to be able to go to these councillors and challenge them if they didn’t feel they were expressing themselves the way they wanted them to,” says Stan Wilder, a member of the advisory council’s staff.
Wilder says one of the most positive responses came from mayoral candidate Bob Chiarelli. The regional chair supported almost every point in the survey, including waiving fees to attract downtown development and exempting most medium- and high-density residential developments from the requirement to provide off-street parking.
“As promised when I campaigned to become regional chair in 1997, we’ve acted specifically to encourage residential development,” Chiarelli wrote. “We must make sure our downtown is a place where people want to live.”
Respondents from urban wards generally showed strong support for the revitalization plan. Claudette Cain, Chiarelli’s main rival in the mayoral race, did not respond to the survey.
Wilder says there was also a good mix of replies from suburban and rural candidates, spanning the new city from Cumberland to West Carleton.
These answers were generally upbeat, but more reserved, Wilder says. Some candidates were willing to consider the council’s ideas, he says, but were concerned they didn’t know how waiving development fees would affect the new city’s budget.
And there were detractors, particularly on the question of parking exemptions.
“This nuttiness has to stop,” wrote Knoxdale-Merivale candidate Gord Hunter.
Somerset candidate Olivia Bradley hasn’t answered the survey, but she says she has concerns about the revitalization plan.
“I found there was an emphasis on decreasing downtown parking,” she says. “That’s pretty much unacceptable.”
Bradley also worries the plan is promoting an “overabundance” of subsidized housing downtown.
“I guess the question is, if there is an overabundance of subsidized housing, can these people support businesses downtown? It’s unlikely.”
But Bradley adds that she likes recommendations such as planting more trees and opening the National Capital Commission to public scrutiny.
Coun. Elisabeth Arnold, who is running for re-election in Somerset, says she would have liked to see more responses, but she thought they were generally positive.
Arnold, who also sits on the advisory council, says the responses will be passed on to community and business groups so they can relay the information to their members.
“I thought that overall the responses indicated that we had some level of support,” she says. “Not everybody supported every initiative, but even when they didn’t support an initiative everybody . . . indicated that they were prepared to look at it.”