Change nothing and nothing changes, says today’s guest columnist. Find out more.
Creative solution can help Centre for Arts, Culture and Innovation add to ongoing downtown revitalization
On Wednesday evening, New Dawn Enterprises appeared before the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) council for the third time to present on its proposed Centre for Arts, Culture, and Innovation.
As was shared with council in 2013 and 2015, this project aspires to restore the 130-yearold Holy Angels Convent in the northend of Sydney and convert the now-vacant building into a Centre for Arts, Culture and Innovation.
Like similar centres across the country, the Centre for Arts, Culture and Innovation would provide affordable work space for artists, innovators and the community to work, gather, collaborate, present and share their new ideas, products and works of art.
This project is both unlike and yet complementary to our other vital, long-standing and highly-respected cultural institutions. This project is about incubation space ¬ a place where people can come to together to work and create and learn, and where arts, innovation and entrepreneurship can intersect.
If we are successful, someday the Centre may be providing spaces for artists who are selling at the Cape Breton Centre for Craft and Design gallery, and spaces for singers, dancers, and actors who are honing their craft and rehearsing their productions for performances at the Highland Arts Theatre, the Savoy Theatre and other world-class theaters across the globe.
The CBRM’s own Creative Economy Growth Plan highlighted the importance of the arts to Cape Breton, the continued vibrancy of artistic traditions that stretch back generations and the increasing economic impact of the arts on the Island.
New Dawn is an organization that facilitates community development. For the last 41 years, it has worked to help create a more self-reliant and vibrant Cape Breton. It does this in its work in housing, home care, immigration, investment, community engagement and it’s recent work on the Centre for Arts, Culture and Innovation.
With respect to the latter, New Dawn has successfully (and doggedly) attracted $8.2 million in federal and provincial funding to a $12-million initiative in downtown CBRM.
Most infrastructure projects of this scale, in order to proceed, require a minimum of one-third capital contribution from the host community. New Dawn has requested a municipal contribution of 12.5 per cent of total project costs – a contribution that can also be paid for over as many years as is needed by the CBRM.
On Wednesday, New Dawn also raised the very difficult and often painful issue of taxes. We all know that greater development is needed if we are to reduce our tax rates – the highest in Atlantic Canada – and yet we are unlikely to attract development with unless we can lower our tax rates.
Today, New Dawn pays more than $300,000 to the municipality in tax revenue. On the Holy Angels property it pays $26,000 and has proposed an annual tax payment post-development of $100,000.
Although perhaps not obvious at first, there are ways in which the Municipal Governance Act would enable such an arrangement to proceed.
Section 71 of the Act allows Council to provide full or partial exemptions to the property of a non-profit community, charitable, fraternal, educational, recreational, religious, cultural or sporting organization if it considers the organization provides a service that might otherwise be provided by Council.
In Atlantic Canada, there are municipalities who take on the running of arts, culture and innovation centres as their work. The Liverpool Town Hall Arts and Cultural Centre is now run by the municipality as a centre for arts, culture and creativity. The Anna Templeton Centre for Craft, Art and Design is operated in partnership with the municipality of St. John’s.
This use of Section 71 of the MGA is not a standard approach for the CBRM. Rather, groups who need help with their taxes are advised to seek some level of relief through an annual request to the CBRM’s Sustainability Fund.
Given that the Sustainability Fund is finite and that many groups already rely on this fund for tax relief, capital improvements, and program and operational costs, unless property taxes soon begin to fall it is hard to see how this is in fact a sustainable solution. The high demand on and finite nature of the fund are particularly evident when new development opportunities, like the Centre for Arts, Culture and Innovation, present themselves.
Using Section 71 of the MGA represents a creative solution to a difficult problem, but most importantly it represents a solution in which everyone wins: the Centre for Arts, Culture and Innovation can proceed adding to the ongoing revitalization of the downtown, the CBRM can increase the tax revenue it collects – from the current $26,000 on the property to at least $100,000 a year – and the finite CBRM Sustainability Fund remains as is.
Using Section 71 of the MGA to enable this project to proceed does require a few things though. First and foremost, it requires the desire to do so.
It also requires an understanding that unless we begin to apply new and creative solutions to the challenges we face, and to the complexities of the opportunities before us (because all projects of this scale are complex in one way or another), 10 years from now we will be exactly where we are today. This would mean losing people, losing business, talking endlessly about economic development, paying consultants to tell us how to find it, and then passing it up when it presents itself because the old tools in our old tool box are incompatible with the times we find ourselves in.
Change nothing and nothing changes.
“Today, New Dawn pays more than $300,000 to the municipality in tax revenue.”