Downtown worth fighting for: BRZ

COMMUNITY ISSUES COMMITTEE HEARS CONCERNS OF DOWNTOWN BUSINESSES

We need to come together, and we need to come downtown. I am Captain Downtown. I love it downtown. – Hunter Heggie – BRZ board member

“The heart of our city is stressed, but it isn’t broken,” Hunter Heggie, Downtown Lethbridge Business Revitalization Zone (BRZ) board member, and owner of King of Trade, told councillors during Monday’s sitting of the Community Issues Committee.

And that stress, he added, can be alleviated despite the challenges the drug crisis has brought to the city’s downtown over the last year.

“We need council to help protect everything we have worked hard to accomplish,” an impassioned Heggie said. “It is not too late, by any means. Our city needs leadership from council. We need you to send a powerful message to the people of Lethbridge it is safe to go downtown because City Hall and the police have our backs ... Yes, we need to have compassion and save lives. But we also need to save livelihoods.”

Heggie was one of about 30 business owners affiliated with the Downtown BRZ who came before council Monday urging it to do more to increase police presence on the streets, and to start trying to help change the channel on a year of negative headlines and lost revenues. Stephen Mogdan of Stringham LLP, also a current Downtown BRZ board member, was another who spoke before council.

“Four or five years ago, we faced much different worries about business in the downtown to what we face now,” Mogdan told councillors. “Online shopping, and the effect that may have on traffic to our businesses in the downtown, was one of our biggest issues that we worried about. And frankly, we would love to have that as our biggest issue to worry about today.”

Mogdan laid out a picture of declining year-over-year revenues and lower attendance at public events and festivals in the downtown from 2017 to 2018.

“What our ask is,” Mogdan told reporters after his presentation to the CIC, “is we want to be there (with council) to be a positive voice. We represent over 500 businesses in the downtown area, and if we can translate any message from council that is supportive to our members— we want to be able to do that.”

“We need to come together, and we need to come downtown,” added Mogdan’s co-presenter Heggie. “I am Captain Downtown. I love it downtown. I spend every day downtown, and I spend a lot of the evenings downtown. It’s a safe place to go.”

Both Heggie and Mogdan acknowledged, however, there are those in Lethbridge who may be wary to come downtown after a year of negative reports on social media and in the headlines pertaining to the drug crisis. They urged council to take concrete steps to encourage more police presence on the streets.

“One of the solutions we highlighted in the presentation is the LPS Ambassador Watch program,” said Mogdan by way of example. “We think the more presence there is on the streets in the downtown, the better things are going to be in the downtown ... The more people see a visible presence, whether it’s police or anybody in a uniform, you tend to drive out problems and make it that much of a better experience for everybody ... We are prepared to, as the BRZ, put some money toward that.”

Mayor Chris Spearman said council will be sitting down in November to determine this year’s operating budget, but admitted councillors are caught in the horns of a fiscal dilemma to ensure municipal spending is brought down and taxes be held at a manageable rate going into the next four years. He said new provincial money for addictions treatment, detox options and transitional housing in the community has been slow in coming. The drug problem on some level, admitted Spearman, was beyond the fiscal capacity of the City of Lethbridge to fix on its own.

“What we are really saying to administration (with our draft budget) is basically zero (increase in spending) for four years in all departments,” he explained. “So how do we deal with issues like this where there is requests for additional funding? What we would have to look at is something like priority-based budgeting. Do the police get more and some other departments get less?”

Spearman said it will be for all nine members of council to decide that question during the upcoming budget consultations.

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