City shelves $1.4M plan for wyandotte Street
Council pumped the brakes Monday on a plan to transform a struggling section of Wyandotte Street into a wondrous-looking “world marketplace” with colourful overhead streamers.
The first phase of the project involved 50 to 70 big banners spanning Wyandotte Street East with a price tag of $1.4 million.
The Wyandotte Town Centre Business Improvement Association, which covers the street between Walkerville and the downtown, was hoping to start the project as early as this spring, chairwoman Tamara Kowalska told reporters after a recorded 7-4 vote dashed their hopes. Council had given its initial approval to earmark $1 million for the project last year at budget time, with the BIA paying the rest. But since then, council has moved forward on an ambitious districting plan with $5 million set aside during this year’s budget deliberations to create themes for the city ’s commercial areas.
The first one is expected to turn Walkerville’s section of Wyandotte into a distillery district. Administration asked what council wanted to do with the world marketplace proposal in light of the districting initiative — release the $1 million, or put things on hold and figure out how it fits in the new strategy? “I just think there was a level of uneasiness with the way the project was moving forward,” Mayor Drew Dilkens told the Star. He isn’t convinced the streamers are a good investment, saying he wouldn’t want people driving down Wyandotte, looking at the streamers and asking: “The city invested $1 million in that?”
But BIA leaders appealed to council to not “push aside” the project, which was five years in the making and involved public consultations and a design competition among architects. “We’ve already seen the impact, people are excited, people are waiting for it,” said executive director Sami Mazloum. Kowalska said people like something different, and the streamers and world marketplace theme could end up doing a fantastic service to the city and reinvigorate the commercial area.
“This is already a success, in that people in the area have regenerated that neighbourhood feeling and people outside the BIA have stopped and congratulated us,” she said.
Coun. Rino Bortolin urged council to embrace the “very unique” project.
“This should be a perfect example of what our districting should look like,” he said.
Coun. Chris Holt said it’s been amazing to see the community get behind the idea. The BIA has gone above and beyond by investing $400,000 and leading the project, he said. “It would be heartbreaking to see this die.”
The majority of council, however, saw some major problems with the project. Coun. Paul Borrelli questioned the world marketplace theme and whether it is a “mis-fit” with “the evolving ethnicity of the area.”
He asked how long the streamers would last, and learned they would need to be replaced after about 10 years, at a cost of around $560,000. The BIA suggested they’d pay for the replacements and also pay for maintenance and taking them down at the end of the fall and putting them up in the spring. But many councillors questioned whether an organization with a $93,000 annual budget could afford such big costs.
“We have to be open to new ideas but we have to look at the mathematical realities,” said Coun. Hilary Payne. “It would be wrong for us to agree to this and lead the BIA into an impossible financial situation.”
Voting for the project were: Bortolin, Holt, Irek Kusmierczyk and Bill Marra. Voting against were Dilkens, Borrelli, Payne, Jo-Anne Gignac, John Elliot, Ed Sleiman and Fred Francis. Council agreed the $1 million earmarked for the project would remain set aside for the area.