City aiming new shot at Smart Cities Challenge

Mayor, city staff and DBIA working on bid to land $50M for affordable housing

City council will vote a final time Monday to prepare an entry to win $50 million for downtown affordable housing in a competition run through the federal government.

Although the Smart Cities Challenge is currently closed and accepting no entries for 2020, DBIA executive director Terry Guiel says he’s got inside information that the competition will reopen in spring.

Although The Examiner was unsuccessful in confirming it last week, Guiel said government spokespeople aren’t yet publicizing Smart Cities 2020.

“But the ones actually rolling it out say it’s a sure thing,” he said.

The Smart Cities Challenge, run by Infrastructure Canada, awarded a top prize of $50 million to the city of Montreal earlier this year for its project to make it easier for vulnerable citizens to access food and transit. Mayor Diane Therrien proposed earlier this month that the city strike a committee — which she would chair — to prepare a Smart Cities entry for 2020.

Her idea is to develop a plan to boost the number of affordable apartments downtown. She told councillors it wouldn’t necessarily be in a single complex — the apartments could be lo

cated here and there in the downtown.

Councillors gave preliminary approval to prepare an entry to Smart Cities, and on Monday the plan will receive a final vote.

Guiel said he and Therrien met with Coun. Keith Riel and a few city staffers on Thursday to start working on a Smart Cities application plan.

“We’ll assemble the right people who can think big and bold and outside the box,” Guiel said. “We believe we can win the $50 million.”

If Peterborough is included on a shortlist of 20 municipalities, states a report from Therrien to councillors, it will win $250,000 to develop a detailed plan.

The city has been plagued with skyrocketing rents for several years, at the same time as the vacancy rate has shrunk to 1.5 per cent as of last year. When the Warming Room homeless shelter closed on July 1, an encampment of more than 40 tents was set up in Victoria Park and smaller tent cities also sprung up at city hall and at parks and church properties.

The large encampment at Victoria Park was dismantled at the end of August, when the homeless were faced with evictions, and many people went to camp elsewhere in public.

Most of the campers who’d pitched tents at Emmanuel United Church or St. John’s Anglican Church (with clergy permission) dispersed this fall; some said they would couchsurf.

The city currently has cots available for homeless people every night in the auditorium of the Peterborough Public Library.

Although those cots are to be moved to the dining hall of Murray Street Baptist Church, it wasn’t clear this week when that will occur.

Renovations are planned to allow the church dining hall to safely serve as a nighttime dormitory, and no information was available this week from city communications manager Brendan Wedley on whether construction has begun.