I am writing to you today to express my
thoughts on the matter of a new events centre for our community, which I
understand Council will be discussing at its upcoming meeting on June 27, 2017.
I am writing to you today as a resident
of Ward 10 (and in no other capacity). I
am copying your Council colleagues this email for their information.
I have been following this matter since the
November 27, 2015 Large Projects Public Input and Information Session (see: “Big ideas and big projects get public airing,” sudbury.com, November 26, 2015), and I
have been engaged in discussions taking place throughout the community – and especially
on social media sites. I highlighted
some of the issues which I felt our local decision-makers should consider when
looking at locations for a new events centre in a column that I wrote for the Sudbury
Star, (“Sudbury centre would attract creative class,” the Sudbury Star, March
11, 2017), including the need for a community facility to act as a catalyst for
supporting the individuals who will be taking up the jobs that our City needs
to attract to prosper and thrive in the future.
While my preference for an events centre
would be to repurpose the existing Sudbury Community Arena, I understand that option
is not presently on the table, and I acknowledge that Council has expressed its
intention to pursue the construction of a new events centre. With that in mind, I’ll focus these comments
on one of the decision’s that Council may be making on June 27th – on
the location of a new events centre.
However, I feel the need to express my dismay that the decision facing
Council next week will not be one informed by a public consultation a process –
a very obvious and troubling omission for those who have wanted to engage in a
discussion about the location of an events centre – or whether a new events
centre should be pursued at all.
I have read both the report to Council of February
22, 2017, which included the February 21, 2017 “Proposed Sports and EntertainmentCentre Feasibility and Business Case Assessment” from PWC (PricewaterhouseCoopers),
and the more recent report to Council dated June 15, 2017, which includes the “GreaterSudbury Event Centre Site Evaluation” report from PWC. I am also familiar with
many of the City’s strategic documents, including the Official Plan (2006), the
Downtown Master Plan (2012) and the City of Greater Sudbury Community
Development Corporation’s community economic development strategic plan, “Fromthe Ground Up, 2015-2025” (2015) and the Downtown Community Improvement Plan.
All of these documents benefited from
significant levels of public consultation, citizen engagement and city-led
stakeholder discussions prior to their adoption by Council. All of these
documents articulate a clear vision for the City’s downtown – a unique location
in the community described as being “the
vibrant hub of a dynamic city” (Official Plan, page 34) and which “plays a key role in defining the City’s
image and quality of place, perceptions that are essential to the success of a
number of City initiatives” fulfilling “its
important function as a local and regional centre of government services,
business, retail, sport and entertainment uses, arts and culture, and community
and institutional uses” that “services
a large catchment area that extends beyond Greater Sudbury.” (Downtown
Community Improvement Plan, page 1).
The provision of cultural amenities,
including institutional uses, in the City’s downtown has been an on-going
feature of planning efforts in our City for at least the past decade. An events centre has been in the downtown is
championed by many of these strategic documents. The Downtown Master Plan contemplates the
retention of the Sudbury Community Arena (in an up-graded form) due to its
function as a catalyst for new business and economic development, along with
other community amenities, including a four-star hotel and conference
centre. Our economic development
strategy builds on the Downtown Master Plan, calling for a new multipurpose
facility for arts, culture and sport in the form of a new community arena in
the “Heart District” (downtown), and
specifically in recommendation 7.1.1 , it calls for the development of a new “arena/sports complex” in the downtown
core.
Clearly, the retention of a community
facility (a community arena / events centre / multi-purpose facility) in our
downtown forms a keystone of the strategies which have been endorsed by Council
and citizens to promote economic development, well-being and livability in our
City.
On Tuesday evening, our elected officials
will be facing a choice – one it arguably should have never been put in a
position to have to make. You will be
asked to choose between the vision that the City has been working on developing
for over 10 years, or to reject that vision and adopt in its place an
alternative vision that has never received the benefit of public input and
consultation – one that is fraught with risk and uncertainty, centred on lands
that have never been evaluated for the types of uses included in this vision.
In contrast to the option of putting a new
community events centre in the downtown, the proposal coming forward from a
local developer is very problematic. The vision is grandiose – quite different
from what Council directed staff to prepare a report on. Yes, the developer’s vision includes a new
community events centre – but it is far more than that. The developer’s intention is to use the
events centre as a lynchpin for future development, including (that we know of
) a casino, hotels, a motorsports park and (possibly) a water park.
Not one of these uses has ever gone through
an evaluation of any sort for appropriateness on the developer’s lands, save
for the recent site selection report from PWC which looked only at whether the
lands might be able to support an events centre. And the findings of that report raise doubts,
as it indicates the lands are not currently zoned for the use proposed (unlike
the downtown).
While it is often thought that rezoning
lands is a fairly straight-forward regulatory matter, that won’t be the case
with these lands. The PWC report
highlights a number of constraints, including the proximity of a municipal
landfill site and its potential impacts on proposed sensitive uses; the costs
of site preparation for the uses proposed; and the acquisition of Crown Lands –
an issue which is out of control of either the City or the development
proponent.
And there are other constraints. The Greater Sudbury Source Protection Plan
highlights issues with salt contamination in one of our City’s primary drinking
water sources, Ramsey Lake. Salt
contamination occurs from the spreading of winter road salt on streets and in
parking lots, where it merges with groundwater and eventually ends up in
streams and lakes. Lands owned by the
Kingsway developer and proposed for an events centre are located in the Ramsey
Lake watershed. His development proposal
requires the construction of a massive new surface parking facility of
approximately 1,200 spots (and that’s just for the events centre – other proposed
uses will have additional surface parking requirements). In contrast, the downtown option is not
anticipated to generate the need for any new parking spaces – and even if new
surface parking were to be contemplated, our downtown is not located in the
Ramsey Lake watershed.
We also know that the developer’s lands on
the Kingsway may contain habitat of species at risk. In a report to Planning Committee for the
rezoning of these lands in 2014, the City identified species at risk as an
outstanding red flag that required further evaluation. It is
not clear that any action has been taken to address this matter, even though it
was flagged by the City in 2014.
The clustering of sports and entertainment
uses at the Kingsway location may ultimately require Council to re-evaluate its
priorities for road maintenance and upgrades, given the considerable vehicular
traffic that is likely to be generated by these uses. Unlike the downtown, where options exist for
alternative transportation and transit, the Kingsway will be largely accessed
by personal vehicles, along a single road.
Existing road priorities, such as widening MR 35, may need to be delayed
or canceled in favour of needed work to make this area of the Kingsway accessible
to traffic. The good news, however,
might be that dubious road projects like MR 35 widening may be reassessed by
the City, given that there will be a shift in jobs and entertainment facilities
from Azilda/Chelmsford to the Kingsway corridor, particularly if the casino
were to co-locate on the Kingsway property. At a time of population and economic
stagnation, road projects like MR 35 are difficult to justify anyway.
There is also the matter of the
appropriateness of lands set aside for industrial uses in the City’s Official
Plan for the uses proposed – most of which, including a casino and a community events
centre - do not appear to be in keeping with industrial area policies. With specific regard to the community events
centre, institutional uses and other community facilities do not appear to be
contemplated in industrial areas. To
rezone these lands for a community events centre facility will be to ignore the
policy direction of the Official Plan as it pertains to industrial uses – along
with the other policy sections of the Plan that relate to the Downtown (Section
4.2.1 ) and Healthy Community (Section 16) policies, which promote the
clustering of community facilities in walkable areas of the City. In his desire to see a community events
centre built on his Kingsway lands, the developer is asking Council to turn its
back on our Official Plan – our guide for developing a strong future for all
Greater Sudburians. While PWC’s site
assessment report indicates that the rezoning of this property may take as much
as a year, given the significant and relevant policy issues and technical
challenges that the uses proposed for this industrial property face, I suggest
that zoning may take longer than a year to complete – and ultimately, changing
the zoning on these lands to permit those uses may never come about.
Further, the ultimate costs of the
developer’s vision have not been assessed.
While I understand that there are some numbers floating around with
regards to how much the City might accrue through new taxation should all
components of the developer’s vision come to fruition, I caution that those
numbers appear to be dubious at best, and certainly nothing that I’ve seen
takes into consideration the anticipated costs
of development in this location.
Basing a decision on anticipated benefits alone just isn’t sustainable –
and anyone promoting even a back-of-the-envelope fiscal analysis that fails to
consider both anticipated benefits and anticipated costs is doing our community
an injustice.
I understand that the City is currently
working on a report that will assess the costs of development in various parts
of the municipality. Moving ahead with a massive new development proposal on
the Kingsway at this time is incredibly premature, given this outstanding
report which at least may provide some additional guidance regarding municipal
cost expectations for development in this location.
And these are just the issues that are
known. There are likely to be others which will only become apparent once
necessary technical studies and evaluations of the site for the appropriateness
of the proposed uses are made. What is
astounding is that no action to address any of the known issues by the
developer appears to have occurred since his location was pitched to Council
back in 2015. There does not appear to
have been any zoning by-law amendment application made. Nor do the issues pertaining to traffic,
species at risk and costs/benefits appear to have been addressed, at least
based on information available to the public.
That these known issues have remained dormant and unaddressed by a
developer who has insisted that he is sincere about his desire to develop is,
frankly, difficult to understand.
For all of these reasons, Councillor
Cormier, I ask that you consider that the best location for a community events
centre is in our City’s downtown. A downtown location is consistent with the
city-building vision articulated for more than a decade in our strategic
planning documents. It’s a vision that
has received significant public buy-in.
And it’s based on what subject matter experts have long insisted – that a
strong, vibrant downtown core acts as the economic engine of our City. Let’s keep that engine well-stoked, going
forward. At a time when our population
is not expected to increase by very many people, the choices that are made now
will resonate down through the decades.
Choices must be sustainable – fiscally, socially and
environmentally.
That’s why the downtown is the only viable
option for an events centre. The risks
associated with selecting the other sites are just too great.
(opinions expressed in this blog are my own and should not be interpreted as being consistent with the views and/or policies of the Green Parties of Ontario and Canada)
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