Sunday, July 19, 2015

Another Big Screen TV on the Horizon

A few years ago I compared the way the city spent money to a household that spends its money impulsively on toys like big screen televisions, then is surprised when there is no money to fix the roof.  I was referring to our collective fondness to load up on recreational facilities at the expense of the boring and mundane business of maintaining basic infrastructure.

The last big example of this was the soccer centre - built without any idea of how much it would cost to run.  But we have other such facilities - the Rawlinson Centre, the waterslides, the Art Hauser Centre.  All of these are great facilities, I agree.  I also know that they cost the city ever-increasing amounts of money to run and maintain, and we have a reluctance to go into those potentially unpleasant details, not just in the deciding stage, but also after the fact.  Just think of how long it took to get reports of where and how much the Rawlinson Centre was costing us on an annual basis.

And then when we have a situation like we did last year, when the waterslides had to be closed because they hadn't been maintained, people are shocked, and expect council to wave some kind of a magic wand to make the necessary money appear.  We don't have a magic wand - we can only raise taxes, which isn't a popular move either.

So one of my constant refrains has been that before we decide to move ahead on any of these wonderful wants (not needs) we need to know what the long-term cost is going to be, and how it's going to be covered.  Hand in hand with that, we need to have a plan that sets out priorities for development, so that the framework for the decision is already there, making the process clear and defensible.

However, rumours are always out there, about the next great thing - I'm sure you've heard about the Olympic-sized swimming pool, or the new hockey rink.

Last week, we were presented with a proposal for a beach volleyball court.  The idea from the group of adults proposing this (yes, this time they won't be able to bring in a bunch of kids to sway our emotions), is that it would be located up by the soccer centre (able to take advantage of the free parking and the washrooms), and the city would, as always, pay for the ongoing operations and maintenance.  Apparently they've raised half the money for construction, but want the city to commit to this before they raise the other half.

I understand that it would be nice to have the city pick up the tab so that a group can indulge in their favourite summer time activity.  But, just as with the soccer centre, there's a tendency to overestimate the use this facility would get, and the potential benefit to the city as a whole.  I'm particularly wary of the hype about bringing in tournaments, since we were promised that with the soccer centre, but not a single tournament has occurred over the last five years.

Not only do we need to have priorities set, we need to decide, as a community, what our capacity is for maintaining recreational facilities.  We need to be realistic about the unfortunate fact that the costs of running things never seem to go down, but only up.  There needs to be some onus on the users of these facilities to contribute more to their upkeep - people seem to feel that it's sufficient to donate to build a new facility, but I haven't noticed too many fund-raising campaigns to pay to keep the lights on and the power running.

It's all a matter of living within our means, and part of that is identifying the whole cost of the opportunities that are presented to us - just like when you buy a house, it's not the purchase price that is the limitation, it's the ongoing maintenance.  Otherwise, you end up with a leaky roof.

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."  J.R.R. Tolkien

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Things I'd Like People to Stop Saying about the Downtown

I was at a meeting a couple of weeks ago with the Downtown Business Improvement District people.  I came home from the meeting thinking that there are a few phrases that are repeated at every meeting, and I'd be quite happy if these could be avoided in the future, because the constant repetition isn't moving us forward, or helping find solutions.

The first is that downtown is the heart of the city.  That may have been true once, but it isn't any more.  To me, the heart of a community is a place where most people go, and I know that there are many people who rarely go downtown, and more who go downtown only because they work there.  You can get by very well without setting foot on Central Avenue north of Fifteenth Street - most shopping and banking is now located elsewhere.  Thirty years ago Central Avenue had three grocery stores and five banks.  Today there is one bank, and no grocery stores.  It doesn't mean that downtown can't thrive - you don't have to be the heart of a city to still be pretty nice.

Another thing that is often said is that we need to have some kind of attraction downtown that will cause people coming from Saskatoon and heading to the lakes to take a detour.  In fact, this idea is often refined to specify that we need to have some kind of water-type attraction.  I'm not sure that this will ever work, for a couple of reasons.  When we were at FCM in Niagara Falls last year, it was quite clear that one of the most amazing water attractions in the world wasn't enough to give that town a thriving downtown.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  The Fallsview area of town was full of people, but the downtown had the same problems that most small town downtowns have - empty storefronts, vacant lots, and not many people.

As for getting people heading to the lakes to stop - they do.  I see recreational vehicles and boats in tow in the Safeway parking lot every Friday morning in the summer.  I see people fueling their vehicles at several gas stations along Second Avenue West.  People stop for their needs, but their objective is getting to the lake as quickly as possible - they're not interested in detours.  I wish that we would focus more on getting the people who live here to come downtown - despite the oft-repeated misconception that there's no sense in trying to do anything in the summer, since everybody goes to the lakes.  I'm one that doesn't, and I think that we should cultivate opportunities for the residents that don't have the wherewithal or desire to go elsewhere in the summer.  There's a potential market with a greater chance of success.

And finally, I think that we look at downtown through too narrow a lens.  It's often said that we need more people living downtown, and those who say that are looking just at Central Avenue.  I prefer to think of downtown as including the surrounding neighbourhoods - to Sixth Avenue on the east and Second Avenue on the west.  If we broaden our lens to include this larger area, all of a sudden we see that there are a lot of people who live downtown.  Instead of focusing improvements on Central Avenue, how much more attractive would these neighbourhoods be if we started improving their amenities - paving streets, fixing sidewalks, adding more green space.  Face it - new light standards on Central Avenue don't make a bit of difference to the people that we want to head there instead of somewhere else.

But if we look at making this larger area more attractive, you will get more people living here, and people living closer to downtown businesses will be more likely to patronize those businesses.  More people being active and visible in an area will result in the area becoming more attractive to others, and feeling safer when they're there.

Improvement to the downtown area isn't going to happen by trying to go backwards, and bringing back all of the businesses that used to be there.  It isn't going to happen by finding a single magic bullet that will suddenly bring hordes of people to the downtown, who will then be so inspired that they will spend all their money there, and change their vacation plans.  But if we make the downtown a more attractive place for the people who live there, the changes that we're looking for will happen incrementally.

There are, of course, no guarantees.  We also need to look at taking more risks, trying new things.  Any real change requires risk, of course.  The irony is that we're far more prone to trying to bring back ideas that worked in the past, even though all the evidence shows that the risk of failure from that sort of approach is higher than trying new things.

So I'm proposing to follow the advice Don Draper gave on Mad Men - if you don't like what people are saying, change the conversation.  Let's change the way we talk about improving the downtown, and maybe we'll start to see the first small signs of change.

"Tradition is a guide, and not a jailer." - W. Somerset Maugham