Point Douglas flexes democratic muscles

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This article was published 04/10/2022 (715 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BY CODY SELLAR

STAFF REPORTER

POINT DOUGLAS

Point Douglas’s three city council candidates — incumbent councillor Vivian Santos and challengers Moe El Tassi and Joe Pereira — gathered in front of about 60 people on Sept. 27 at Saddlery on Market for a community forum in advance of the Oct. 26 municipal election.

Candidates provided background and laid out their platforms (which are already detailed in a separate Free Press Community Review article) before the floor was opened to questions.

One man, who said he has lived in the Exchange District since 1990, asked candidates how they planned to attract people to the area who have the resources to invest in the Exchange District.

El Tassi said he was “big on economic development,” but offered little in the way of concrete ideas to attract investors to the area. He did say he supports incentivizing businesses to hire “local residents from the area through a payroll tax.” Payroll taxes, or income taxes, are collected by the provincial and federal governments, rather than municipal governments. El Tassi also said he’d “dive headfirst into the files” if elected, to come up with a “more appropriate answer.”

Santos said the city needs a “secondary plan” for the Exchange District and South Point Douglas, at a cost of $250,000, that would enable interested developers to more easily move into the area. Development increases the area’s tax base through property taxes, Santos said.

Pereira said the city needs to “offer incentives to businesses to come down” through tax incentives, as well as to citizens to move into the area as new residents. One woman asked if the councillors would support removing or reducing parking minimums in order to encourage development. Parking minimums are dictated by the municipal government, and regulate the number of parking stalls required per residential unit in new developments. That number ranges from 1.2 – 1.5 stalls per unit.

Santos said she wants to see parking minimums removed categorically. However, she said the city needs to co-operate with organizations such as Peg City Co-op to solve some of the transportation issues that could arise.

Pereira said he advocated for “proper planning” to reduce the number of parking lots in the area. El Tassi said “there’s more strategic ways to find better ways to park,” and that removing minimums could “empower people to take public transit,” and reduce their carbon footprint.

Attendees expressed concerns with the number of derelict buildings in the ward and with the city’s inability to enforce existing bylaws to assuage the issue or with the toothlessness of the city’s bylaws in the first place.

“Who’s going to do something?” one woman asked.

Santos blamed this on a shortage of bylaw enforcement staff, at which some attendees grumbled in disbelief.

At the end of the night, attendee Terry Moore said that, while he was happy to see such a good turnout, he was somewhat disappointed with the evening.

“We were just skating around stuff. Vivian Santos is the person on the hot seat, as they said. She conducted herself well, I thought. And the others were kind of thin in their grasp of actual civic issues,” he said.

Attendee Gary Gervais was even less optimistic: “To be honest, no one stood out. I wish we had stronger candidates.”