November 21st City Council Agenda Summary
Here are the issues that I think will be of interest on the November 21st City Council Agenda.
1. Proposed changes to the guidelines for development in the River Landing area to accommodate Victory Majors and the Parcel Y Development.
City Council will debate whether to make changes (again) to the guidelines for River Landing to allow for: more office space, higher buildings (up to 95meters), more flexible stepbacks, and a larger floor space ratio.
At this point in the debate I have decided to focus my energy on the \"public space\" component of this development. Victory Majors (Nassers) have quite dramatically changed the development that was earlier proposed by Michael Lobsinger and Lake Placid Development. They have certainly made some improvements to push the buildings to the back of the site so that the public plaza is not surrounded by buildings, and brought the plaza down to the street level so you don\'t have to climb up stairs to get to it.
While I still think that River Landing as a whole would be better served on this site if we had broken up Parcel Y into a set of smaller development parcels that result in a more diversified set of human scaled activities along the street (restaurants, shops, etc). I believe that ship has sailed.
In this case the developers are asking for significantly greater development rights, and I think it is reasonable then to have very high expectations about building a successful people place on the ground in front of the private buildings going on sight. This means having an agreement that ensures that the site can\'t be closed off to the public and that the plaza is built with the best practices in building public spaces in mind. This is what I am going to be arguing for. They are working with a pretty well renowned group of architects and have made commitments to ensure that the plaza is a good people environment. It will be in the next stage of approval that these guidelines will be put to the test.
2. The submission of the \"Street Activity Study\" (originally the panhandling study) and the proposal to hire 5 \'community support officers\' to maintain a presence in the Downtown, Broadway, and Riversdale districts.
This item emerges out of a controversial debate about panhandling in Saskatoon. On the positive side, comes in response to earlier efforts by some in the community and on City Council to try to ban panhandling outright in parts of the City. What we see now is a more complex look at the issues of panhandling and street safety. The process and the report are leading to a recognition that we are largely dealing with social issues and perceptions and that attempting to solve anything with just enforcement and suppression will fail.
The report contains the results of interviews with the general public, business owners, and panhandlers themselves. These interviews reveal that many stereotypes and prejudices remain in our community, and concludes that the issues surrounding \'street safety\' are more about perception than about reality. One shortcoming of the report in my opinion is that it does not provide much context to show the difference between perception and reality, and the fact that crime is actually going down in Saskatoon even as people\'s fear of each other seems to be going up.
In responding to the report I believe as a City we need to be careful not to make public policy measures based just on people\'s perceptions, or worse based on stereotypes. We need to focus on measures that actually increase safety and a sense of inclusion in our community for everyone, regardless of your circumstances. The discussion of panhandling and street safety can be interpreted as a discussion of who is \'acceptable\' on our sidewalks, in our stores and public spaces and who isn\'t. This is a dangerous discussion that can foster an us vs. them approach to our community, when people\'s \'perceptions\' of safety become a reason to discriminate against people simply because they don\'t look or act in \'mainstream\' ways.
In reading the report I am left thinking that \'problem panhandling\' is a much smaller problem in Saskatoon than the persistence of stereotypes and falsely held fears between different groups in our community.
There is a valuable discussion in the report of the fact that we have a shortage of services in our community to respond to people who are homeless, or living with addictions, or struggling with mental health issues. There is also an interesting assessment of how other Cities have responded, Calgary and Toronto in particular, with a more compassionate and outreach based approach to start with getting people connected to services and supports where needed as opposed to trying to move them out of the way.
As a result of the report, and some further investigation into what other Cities are doing, including a trip to Calgary, the Panhandling Task Force (made up of the Police Service, the City, the Anti Poverty Coalition, and the three Business Improvement Districts) is recommending that the City hire 5 uniformed \'Community Support Officers\' to be a presence in the downtown, Broadway and Riversdale areas. The recommendation is that 80-90% of the work of these officers would be to get to know everyone, from the people sitting on benches and panhandling to the business owners, office workers, and shoppers, to provide a set of eyes on the street and to help connect people to services where. They would have police radios and would have the ability to enforce the panhandling restrictions about being outside of an ATM or within 10m of a liquor store, or if there is aggressive panhandling. The proposal is to have these officers paid for with Parking revenues, using money that is otherwise right now slated for streetscaping work.
To me the devil will be in the details of this recommendation. I think that these Officers could be a real asset if they are trained primarily as social workers, with good listening skills, a clear understanding of mental health and addictions issues, good negotiating skills, a broad understanding of the services available and the ability to build bridges between the world of the office worker and the world of the person sitting in front of McDonalds. In Calgary and Toronto these workers have been effective at connecting people to services, and create a greater sense of safety for everyone in their downtowns.
There is also a recommendation to explore the addition of another facility for people to go when publicly intoxicated, because the present Brief Detox Unit is full and right now alot of people are being taken to jail cells which is not an appropriate place to take people who are simply under the influence.
Finally there is a recommendation to create a \"Safe Streets Working Group\" which would carry on with the work of (1) increasing the perception of safety on Saskatoon Streets and (2) ensuring that people are not on the street because they have nowhere else to go.
3. The submission of the Public Space, Activity, and Urban Form Strategic Framework for the City Center as part of the development of a City Center Plan for Saskatoon.
This is quite a remarkable report that provides a tremendous amount of information and ideas about out the Center of our City (downtown, Broadway, and Riversdale). It is a unique report for our City because it combines the work of gathering information about how people use our public space with a range of economic, demographic, climactic information about our City. A particularly interesting part of the report is the \"Opportunities\" section that draws on the study of the patterns of use downtown and puts ideas forward about how to improve on and re-envision aspects of our center city. There are about a dozen ideas that are pretty intriguing. I believe this study could be a very valuable asset in helping move forward with more economic development in the center city too, especially to figure out how to drive mixed use development on our sea of surface parking lots and create more vibrant areas in spots that are basically hostile to people now (especially the area surrounding Idylwyld Dr and the Warehouse district).
The next step for the City Center Plan is to go into a strategic planning process to improve the transportation, pedestrian, building design standards, and public spaces in the city center area.
4. The beginning of streetscaping of the Central Avenue in Sutherland as part of the Central Avenue Master Plan
There is a recommendation to begin construction on a long awaited project to improve Central Avenue. The project will start between the south side of the intersection of Central and109th to the north side of the intersection of Central and 110th.
5. The submission of two reports about Transit - one assessing the impact of eliminating fares for Transit, and one exploring best practices for improving Transit
These are interesting and timely reports that I hope will help stimulate some bigger picture planning on making our Transit system more geared to the 21st Century. The zero-fare report was done by the Saskatoon Environmental Advisory Committee and examines the impact of providing transit for free and concludes that it probably isn\'t a good idea, but comes up with some other recommendations. The one on best practices in Transit looks at other Cities between 100,000 and 400,000 people and explores ideas for improving ridership, marketing, fares, and scheduling.
That\'s all for now,
Enjoy the sun and the clear air!
Write a comment
- Required fields are marked with *.