Public in dark over demolition of heritage buildings
In 2016, Edmonton city council allowed the demolition of 12 different heritage buildings on the city’s official Inventory of Historic Resources
And the pace of demolition seems to be speeding up.
Council green-lighted the demolition of another nine buildings on the historic resources inventory in the first half of 2017.
That’s 21 of the city’s most special heritage buildings, gone in less than 18 months.
Of those, 15 were private homes while 16 were commercial buildings. They include houses, large and small, that once stood in Garneau and Glenora and Crestwood and Highlands and McKernan and Queen Alexandra.
But we only know that thanks to the dogged investigative reporting of my Edmonton Journal/ Edmonton Sun colleague Elise Stolte. For months now, Stolte has been filing freedom of information, or FOIP, requests with city hall, trying to get access to the previously private memos sent to city councillors by senior city managers.
She’s just won a major moral victory — not just for Postmedia, but for all Edmontonians. From now on, the city is promising it will release such memos — from May 1 of this year, onward — on all sorts of subjects, in a searchable database, one we can all read.
While combing through a batch of such memos, Stolte found one that outlined the pace of heritage demolitions.
I’m pleased the city has agreed to make most of its internal memos, whether they’re on traffic flow or bus replacement or infill projections, available to the public in the future.
But there’s a catch. We’ll only get to see the memos two months after they’ve been written, after the city’s own FOIP staff have ensured that they contain no sensitive private information and approve them for release.
And in the case of heritage buildings facing demolition? That may be two months too late.
The Inventory of Historic Resources is supposed to be a list of the city’s most important heritage buildings, whether they are private, commercial, or public. Each building on the list has been carefully evaluated for its architectural integrity, its relevance to social history and its importance to our urban landscape.
No one can demolish such a building without the permission and blessing of city council. But councillors rarely say no — because if they deny the demolition permit, they have to compensate the building’s owners, not just for the current value of the building, but for the hypothetical future value of the property, if it were developed.
Any time an owner applies for a demolition permit to knock down a building on the Inventory of Historic Resources, the city’s chief planner sends a memo to the mayor, to every city councillor and to the deputy city manager.
But not to us.
The news that an important heritage building is about to be demolished still won’t be shared with the public, not until two months after the fact.
You can hardly blame private property owners who want to knock down heritage buildings from preferring to act without a lot of public attention and hubbub.
But the whole point of the historic resources inventory is that we have some kind of collective, community interest in protecting our architectural and social heritage.
Of course, not every building can and should be saved. Some the buildings on this list of 21 were in terrible shape, all but falling down. But some buildings are particularly special.
Once we’ve gone to all the trouble of putting them on a public list of community resources, once we’ve said that they can only be torn down with council approval, shouldn’t the public at least get a head’s up that they’re at risk so citizens can, at least, hold council responsible for its decisions to allow demolition?
Peter Ohm, the city’s chief planner, acknowledges that the loss of so many heritage buildings, in such a short time is “being perceived as a kind of a loss.”
“This is an issue I think we need to talk about and look at,” he said.
Ohm says the city needs better tools for heritage preservation. And he’s right.
But how do we begin to have these conversations and find those tools if we cloak so much critical information in secrecy, if we allow council to approve the demolition of these landmark buildings in secret, without public scrutiny or comment?