Downtown Plaza will be beautiful, but at what cost, asks councillor?

How much is too much for council to spend on the new Downtown Plaza?

In August 2019, council was first presented with the concept of a Downtown Plaza. At the time, the cost of the project was said to be $6.6 million, with only $2.3 million coming from the city, and the balance of $4.3 million to come from higher levels of government.

I happily supported the plaza at that time, believing it was time for the city to put some skin in the downtown re-development game.

At a cost of just over $2 million, I thought the city’s contribution was reasonable, and formed less than half of the total cost for the new plaza. Along the way, two things happened: the cost of the plaza increased, and the funding from the upper levels of government didn’t pan out.

The federal government did give funding through FedNor, though only $500,000. The province denied the $2-million funding request, even though they supported a similar concept in Thunder Bay with $5 million in funding. 

By this time, the total project cost had increased 28%, and the total project was now expected to cost $8.45M instead of $6.6M. What council was asked to contribute grew even more.

From the $2.3 million we were originally asked to support, council was being asked to increase the city’s share by 300%, and put in $6.9 million of the total cost from city money. 

Ultimately, the majority of council did approve the construction of the downtown plaza at the substantially increased cost to the City of $6.9 million. There’s no doubt at more than $8 million the new plaza will be beautiful. It will have every feature we could have hoped for, but it begs the question, how much was too much for this development? At $2.3million, we were going to have a plaza that served to assist in redeveloping our downtown.

At $8.5 million, we are taking on downtown redevelopment on our own with very little help from upper levels of government. The additional city money going into the plaza could’ve gone to other aspects of downtown improvement, like increased police patrols on Queen Street, or a pot of money to repair derelict properties downtown. How much would have been too much to pay for the new plaza? In my opinion, a 300% increase from the original projected municipal contribution fits the definition of “too much”. 

Matthew Shoemaker