‘IT COULD GO DARK’
Northlands site offers ‘tremendous’ opportunity to fix mistakes of past
Residents bordering the 64-hectare Northlands site want one thing when it comes to what happens next in its future development — a voice.
When Northlands revealed its Vision 2020 proposal in February last year, a multimillion-dollar plan that proposed refurbishing the aging Rexall Place, renovating the Expo Centre’s Hall D and turning the old racetrack and its encircling land into a vast outdoor festival space and concert bowl, there were a few raised eyebrows.
One of the main questions was why had it taken so long for this plan to come to fruition?
After all, the city and Northlands knew years earlier that the area’s days were numbered thanks to the Katz Group’s redevelopment of the downtown core into Canada’s largest mixed-use sports and entertainment district.
Another of the questions being asked is where was the community consultation during the development of Vision 2020? A survey may have collected more than 20,000 public engagement responses once the plan was released, but what stuck in the craw of many was a lack of input in the development of the plan.
“If Northlands had come to us when they were starting the process, I think they might have been able to get further along with it, but at the point in which they came to us, they had already developed it,” said Bellevue Community League president Brian Finley.
“Now there is no Vision 2020 anymore and we are already way behind. We have lost seven years and now we are at the point it could go dark.”
A Mainstreet Poll released Friday showed that 41 per cent of respondents disapproved of the decision to close the old arena while 37 per cent approved. An equal percentage of respondents (28 per cent) said the arena should be repurposed for use as a multiplex rink or a multiuse sports facility.
As they worry, area residents point to other projects around the city with drawn-out histories: Belvedere’s stalled Station Pointe redevelopment dates back to the start of the 2000s, and the “community visioning process” for The Quarters project in eastern downtown began in 2006 and its development has since been “sluggish.”
Then there is the 217-hectare Blatchford project at the site of the former Edmonton Airport. Many question whether the site’s homeowners will in fact move into the community as early as winter 2018 as the city has previously indicated.
But comparing Northlands with Blatchford is fraught with problems, warns Ward 7 incumbent Tony Caterina. Blatchford, he said, was a brownfield site, yet Northlands is ahead of the game in terms of infrastructure and city services.
“The two don’t compare to each other,” he said. “This site has the biggest potential to move forward really, really quickly.”
In fact, Caterina said an area redevelopment plan for the site is starting and “stakeholders are being assembled,” including the “communities surrounding the lands.”
Four other candidates vying to become Ward 7’s next councillor who spoke with the Journal agreed with Finley in that the most important issue around the redevelopment is genuine and meaningful community consultation.
“It’s a massive site with tremendous potential, but we have to be very mindful of what we want to see there and that means talking to the communities around there,” Mimi Williams said. “Maybe we’re not done with the Coliseum just yet. I think all of the proposals that were put forward were all sports-related and I don’t think they have to be.”
Matthew Kleywegt and Liz JohnWest both pointed to the need for an assisted living facility or housing for seniors as part of the project to help alleviate pressures in the ward.
John-West also suggested that the city could either develop the site or sell the land at fair market value and have the developer develop the land within a prescribed time frame.
Kris Andreychuk pointed to a report commissioned by Northlands last year that looked at the financial impact of redeveloping or not redeveloping the site that suggested home values within a one kilometre radius of the site could drop between $13,000 and $27,000 if it becomes derelict and could lose the city as much as $870,000 annually in property taxes.
The same report shows if the site was redeveloped, it could increase property prices by two to five per cent or between $5,300 and $13,000, and could increase property taxes by as much as $1.8 million annually and increase general revenues to the city by $22.2 million in land sales.