Dear Editor:
I was glad to see that some residents have finally woken up to the, in my opinion, harebrained plan to demolish part of the downtown parkade.
The truth is someone at city hall wants it gone, and they are hell-bent on achieving that goal no matter how much taxpayer money they have to waste to achieve it. In addition to sitting on the downtown parking commission, the past year as chair, I was a member of the stakeholder group that participated in the 2013 downtown parking study. I attended the last stakeholders' meeting in December 2013 and listened to the two consultants that were heading up the work in a before the meeting conversation. Their honest conclusion was that the only significant problem with parking in downtown is that is, and I quote, "abysmally badly managed." Of course that wasn't the official conclusion of their report, which toed city hall's party line on the matter, a preordained conclusion that cost taxpayers $90,000+, and flies in the face of the needs and desires of downtown building owners, businesses (who paid for its construction through a special tax levy between 1959 and 1986 in order to meet the city's parking bylaws) and residents.
I am officially on record as supporting the city's waterfront vision. I have tried hard to see how spending millions of dollars to demolish an asset that has a usable lifespan, with proper maintenance (that hasn't been undertaken in many years), of many, many more decades gets us any closer to that vision.
The best publicly available views of the Fraser from downtown are actually from the decks of the parkade! Instead of tearing it down, we should be converting parts of it into safe, attractive public green space - the entire top deck, for instance. What we get, for probably a lot less money, is expanded public space that integrates with the existing park, is easy on the eye from the thousands of condos that look down on it, a distributed parking facility that continues to match the business patterns in downtown and an effective cover for the busiest truck route in the Lower Mainland shielding residents from the noise the 5,000 or more trucks a day make as they transit our city.
By investing in upgrades to the facility, we build value instead of destroying it.
This strategy also ties in with a key component of the city's Transportation Master Plan, which recommends that truck traffic be routed as much as possible to our perimeter roads, making Front Street one of, if not, the most critical element in achieving that goal.
Upgrades like a four-foot-high sound barrier, cosmetic upgrades to the parkade and the completion of the rail corridor barrier that is part and parcel of the train whistle cessation project will make Front Street much more pedestrian-friendly.
Creating an elevated park just steps from Columbia Street that becomes part of a larger park network makes downtown New West a better place for its citizens, the businesses everyone would like to see in our city core and a destination that puts us back on the map as a place people like to visit.
As far as the support of the BIA as mentioned by Coun. Chuck Puchmayr, it was completely contingent on the city delivering on a promise that equivalent distributed parking be available before the demolition was to take place.
In my opinion, this criterion has not been met and none of the plans I've seen presented to date deliver on this commitment.
Finally I'd like to comment on the budget. The first budget number that was made public was $2 million; now it's $3.8 million for the repairs, an additional how many millions for demolition plus another $2 million to redo Front Street into the mews.
Let's compare that to the waterfront park access! Preliminary budget $1.2 million, current estimate $3.4 million, and how many months behind schedule. Are we as taxpayers really going to stand still while our city fathers waste somewhere between $5 and $10 million on a plan that has no hope of achieving the stated objective of improving residents' access to the Fraser River?
According to Chuck Puchmayr, it's too late to change the decision! What do you think?
Harm Woldring, New Westminster
