By Michael Connors
It’s a tale of one city and two visions. The story begins with downtown worried about losing influence on a new city council filled with suburban and rural seats.
From the start, Somerset Candidate Elisabeth Arnold has said Centertown’s biggest challenge will be to remain a priority.
Just five of the municipal wards lie entirely within current Ottawa boundaries, while another five straddle the boundaries with surrounding suburbs. That leaves 11 wards falling entirely outside the old city.
That has raised fears among community groups that downtown revitalization will lose out to suburban expansion.
“With the change on the composition of council with more suburban and rural councillors, we need to make sure that people make commitments to keeping the core healthy, because if you don’t have a healthy core, you don’t have a healthy city,” Arnold says.
And a healthy core needs to support the people living in it, she says.
The city’s Downtown Advisory Council plans to send a survey to all candidates after the Oct. 13 nomination deadline. Asking about 10 questions about revitilization, the council hopes to find out who is friendly to Centretown issues.
But while candidates in suburban wards agree a healthy core is important to their own interests, the vision sometimes differs.
“When you think about the downtown core, you often think about tourism,” says City of Nepean Coun. Jan Harder.
Harder, who is a candidate for Bell South Nepean, says suburban shoppers go downtown too, so traffic calming and public transit don’t sit very well with Nepean City Council.
“You’ve got Diane Holmes, for example, who wants everyone’s behind on a bus, on a bike, or on foot,” she says. “Well, the challenge for the suburban people is, ‘Hello, it can’t happen.’”
Regional Coun. Herb Kreling, who is running for re-election in Orleans, says the issues are nothing new to the regional council. He says a balance can be found for the two visions of downtown.
“We can deal with the problems on a local basis, but we can deal with the overall concepts and the assignment of resources in a practical and sensible way.”
Kreling says the 11 wards that fall outside old Ottawa are divided into suburban and rural interests, and the rural wards themselves worry about being drowned out in the new city.
“There’s nobody that’s going to have a majority.”