City council gave the Lansdowne Live proposal the green light last week with rural and suburban councillors tipping the balance in its favour.
Somerset Ward Coun. Diane Holmes says rural and suburban councillors shouldn’t be able to dictate what goes on in downtown neighbourhoods.
She says the amalgamation of Ottawa Carleton’s 11 regions nine years ago left urban-area councillors at a disadvantage in terms of voting power.
“The four rural people were given twice the amount of political clout because they have half the number of residents,” says Holmes, who was undecided about the proposal until recently.
Holmes says she ultimately voted against the plan because she had questions about how the sole-sourced project backed by the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group would make money for the city.
Holmes says it’s typical that the rural and suburban more conservative votes dominate.
Changing the structure of the system so there is representation by population would help rectify the imbalance, she says.
Kanata North Ward Coun. Marianne Wilkinson, who voted in favour of the Lansdowne Live proposal, says urban councillors have to work harder to court support from the rural councillors on issues that concern residents in their wards.
“They don’t try very hard to get us to support them, and I
work hard to get the things I need for my ward,” Wilkinson says.
She says urban councillors who didn’t like the Lansdowne Live proposal should have sought out ans presented viable alternatives to council, instead of just criticizing it.
Ian Lee, a strategic management and international business specialist at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, says it’s inevitable that the councillors with wards closer to the development will have the strongest opinions.
But he says that doesn’t mean urban councillors should get any more say in the decision-making process.
Lee, who has publicly criticized Lansdowne Live as a bad business proposal for the city and is a resident of the Glebe, is personally frustrated that suburban and rural councillors held the balance of power, but says the solution is not to give the votes of certain councillors more weight.
“Should everybody living within one kilometre get a majority vote?” he says.
Instead, Lee advocates a change to the power structure of municipal government as a potential solution to regional tensions that were evident in the debates surrounding Lansdowne Live.
He suggests a model where the mayor, who represents the interests of the entire city, would have more power than councillors in a system with checks and balances to prevent abuse of that position.
Stittsville-Kanata West Ward Coun. Shad Qadri says he believes that after nine years these kinds of regional tensions shouldn’t still exist between city councillors.
“The days of those fights between the urban and the rural should not be happening. As one entity that facility belongs to everybody in this city.”
He says Lansdowne Live will benefit the entire city – rural, suburban and urban.
Qadri, who voted in for the proposal, says the site was a huge liability for Ottawa. Now, it will be transformed into a beautiful cultural feature residents can be proud of, he says.
The deal goes back to a vote in June 2010 after further negotiations with the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group.
The decision followed votes on more than a dozen amendments to the proposal, including one concerning the project’s financing and another mandating city control of the design.
Holmes says the fact that the city will have more say in the design has helped her come to terms with the agreement.
She says many of the people in her ward thought the original plan involved too much retail.
“How well we can control the commercialization will be I think in the end what matters to our residents.”
–With files from Ian Shelton