VIDEO: 'We all want to see it succeed,' mayor says of downtown plaza

One of Sault Ste. Marie’s most polarizing topics — the Downtown Plaza — will soon be a real thing. 

As SooToday reported earlier this month, July 28 is the target date for completion of the $11.6-million project. In anticipation, the Mill Market and the city put out a call last week for would-be vendors to fill the “mobile retails units” (to be made out of retrofitted shipping containers) that will form part of the site.

Back when he was a city councillor, Matthew Shoemaker was a vocal opponent of the plaza’s escalating price tag. Now that he’s mayor — and construction was too far along to halt — Shoemaker says the city is focused on doing “everything we can do to make it a success.”

“It’s too late to go backwards on the plaza, and so we are going to see it through to the end,” the mayor said, during a recent interview in our SooToday studio marking his first six months in office. “We all want to see it succeed. Nobody is hoping that the place will fail.”

Our full interview with Mayor Shoemaker can be found HERE. 

You can also watch these previously published snippets of the mayor talking about:

• The old hospital site

• How to improve safety in the downtown core

• What to do about a local landlord who owes the city $381,000 in unpaid fines for a long list of fire and building code violations

• Where to put a supervised consumption site in town