After nearly an hour of discussion, Prince George City Council decided to postpone a vote on a pilot project that would allow vacant ground-floor spaces in downtown Prince George to be used temporarily without rezoning.
The item came to the Council table as a notice of motion from Councillor Trudy Klassen, referencing a similar motion passed in Vancouver.
“Basically just expanding the use and making it easier for small start ups or pop-up operations or temporary services to more easily be able to use the vacant properties in our city, like in our downtown zone,” Klassen said.
The motion would direct City Staff to report back to Council, as part of the Down Strategy report, on the program.
Councillor Cori Ramsay said the piece missing for her was “what does the project look like for staff?”
“I need maybe more of a layout of what that pilot program looks like,” she said.
“I think it’s a great idea, I would love to see more of the store fronts utilized downtown for that temporary or trial type businesses to see what works.”
“This is aimed by Councillor Mike Klassen in Vancouver at actually making the Downtown Eastside functional,” said Councillor Garth Frizzell.
“If they can come up with something that can be effective there, then that’s remarkable and it’s something that we should be looking at.”
Councillor Kyle Sampson said he wasn’t sure where the City would “interact with some of the pieces in the motion.”
“My perception on the real barrier there is that it’s less the bureaucracy or the red tape and more the actual risk,” he said.
“It’s the start up costs, it’s the market conditions, it’s competition, and so wanting to give something a try, this is my perception, in our downtown zone, is more about is my business or idea viable and less about the process to get through with the City to actually operate there.”
It was also noted by staff that the Downtown Strategy is actually being led by Downtown Prince George.
Klassen said if the motion wasn’t worded right, she would welcome staff to let her know how it should be worded.
“I don’t think anyone around our table intends to send the signal that we don’t care about the fact that the downtown is empty,” Klassen said after about 40 minutes of discussion on the topic.
“We come 4:30 in the afternoon, there is so little activity, that is the problem that I am trying to solve. I don’t think I’m wrong to say that the majority of Council would support that. The challenge then is and how do we activate that desire?”
“Calling downtown empty and boring is offensive to me, and I think it’s offensive to the hard working business owners in our community who are pouring their hearts and souls, their life savings into our downtown,” Sampson said in response.
“Do we have problems? Do we have vacancy? Absolutely, but I just wanted to stress that we need to be really careful about how we’re wording things around this table and the message that it sends.”
“We’re going nowhere in a hurry and this in my opinion, part of our dysfunction,” said Councillor Brian Skakun.
“We spent an hour on something, there’s a lot of good intentions, we’ve gone absolutely nowhere and we’re probably not going to go anywhere because we’ve talked about referring to Administration, but rightly Administration has said they don’t even know what’s expected of them in a referral.”
The item was eventually tabled and postponed to the September 3rd Council meeting.
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