Walters pushes for a better civic vision
Coun. Michael Walters is a man on a mission.
Walters has been a team player for his five years at city hall, but he’s tired of the status quo. He’s now exhibiting a burning impatience to push for Edmonton to become not just an efficient city or a woke enclave of social justice, but a splendid city, as he calls it, highlighted by the jewel of a far more vibrant river valley core.
In a series of speeches, blog posts and interviews, Walters calls for a number of linked measures: a hard look at cutting the city’s No. 1 operational cost of staff salaries and benefits, which prevents the city from meeting other goals; the end of administration dabbling in the land-development game; and the selling off of surplus city land with profits used for civic priorities such as social housing and redeveloping the river valley core.
“I don’t want to waste any more time,” he said. “I’m a nice guy and I try to get along with folks and I’m a team builder. I really am. That’s my disposition. But we’ve got to break some eggs and hurt some feelings.”
Walters’ vision is built around one idea: attracting private housing investment into the inner core.
This will only happen, he said, if permitting is sped up and if the city invests in necessary infrastructure.
For example, West Rossdale in the downtown river valley has awaited development for three decades now. The old Epcor power plant sits empty. But for a private development to make economic sense, tens of millions are needed to fix up streets and sewer lines, as well as fix up the crumbling old plant.
There’s no appetite for taxes to pay for such investment, but here is where Walters gets creative. The city is a land baron, owning 12 per cent of all land within city limits. It also has a development company, the Enterprise Land Corporation, that engages in suburban development.
But Walters can’t figure out why.
“I can’t think of one good reason for us to be competing with suburban land developers.”
The best bet, Walters said, is to sell off land to actual suburban developers, then use that money on civic priorities to actually build more affordable housing or to get going in Rossdale.
“When you have these big hairy development opportunities like Rossdale, we need a different mindset, a real publicprivate partnership approach. We know that if we take existing resources like we have tied up in the value of all this suburban land, brought that money over to invest in the infrastructure for Rossdale, that reduces some of the cost that an investor needs to take on to make the investment in the first place.”
What would he say to folks who don’t value downtown investment?
“I would say they have travelled and they’ve been blown away by those very districts in other cities. That’s where they go. They don’t travel to Portland or Seattle or New York or London or Toronto or Vancouver then go to an East Side Mario’s in a suburban strip mall. They go to those local, authentic Edmonton only or Vancouver only kinds of places.”
With the right private-public partnership, Rossdale can be the heart of a remarkable commercial, cultural and residential area, Walters said.
“It will be an amazingly splendid and attractive district that professionals are going to want to live in, that are going to underpin our economic growth in the next couple decades.
“We want to add a splendid livability that allows us to say to young people in Vancouver and Toronto, ‘Yes, those are great cities, but you really can’t afford to live there, but you can have much of what you get there here and you can afford to buy a home and live a life.’ Rossdale is an important part of that because it’s the central signature development opportunity.”
As for city spending, Walters said it’s time to study the everrising salaries and benefits that are driving up taxes and swamping other civic priorities.
“We’ve started to think big and now it’s time to start acting big and part of acting big is to unravel the mediocrity that we’ve dealt with for decades, which is how I’ll describe our base budget. It’s an albatross, a yoke around the neck of our biggest dreams.”
Quite the statement. It’s guaranteed to make political enemies.
But in terms of a vision to get Edmonton moving, I haven’t heard anything so compelling and refreshing since Stephen Mandel started kicking butts in his first mayoral campaign.