Moncton’s Downtown Improvement Plan On Track For Adoption
MONCTON – The Moncton City Council is on track to adopt its Downtown Core Community Improvement Plan as no objections were received at the public hearing at Monday’s meeting.
The hearing was part of the adoption process of the plan, which will guide city staff, council and developers.
“In the next meeting, I think in two weeks, I think it’ll go through adoption, then begin to be implemented,” said Jim Scott, a landscape architect and planner who presented the plan to council.
Scott’s company, Trace Planning & Design, is working with the city to develop the 20-year plan. The first five years will be the most important, he said.
“[We’ll] get the new street corridors in place, begin to do some investment into some of these public spaces and get the parking model underway,” he said.
Scott will speak more about the downtown parking strategy in his last presentation in August, along with policies that need to be adopted to implement the plan and the administration of the plan.
“Essentially [the plan] is to turn a lot of the parking lots into revenue streams for the city so the city can then reinvest into the urban core – parks, plazas, parking structures, different buildings that they may partner with in the future,” he said. “We can’t just take land away from people who actually do need parking. A lot of the urban core commercial lease space providers provide parking as part of their leases.”
Many of these under-utilized surface parking areas are located between Main Street and the Riverfront Park, two of the city’s key assets.
“Right now the downtown is working almost at capacity. It requires almost all the parking that it has there today. So if we’re going to do anything different within the urban core, then we’re either gonna build structures into what we’re doing or look at different dispersal models,” he said.
These can be in the form of destination parking lots, an active transportation system, or a change in the transit system so more ways to move in and out of downtown are integrated.
On Monday’s presentation, Scott spoke about linking Downing street to the downtown centre, as well as development in certain neighbourhoods that are within the improvement plan, including the central commercial district. There also plans to create a walkable path connecting the riverfront to all other public plazas and green spaces within the downtown area, among others.
Moncton is hoping to attract more people to live downtown, to be followed by businesses that want to serve those residents, similar to what happened in Halifax and Fredericton, Scott said.
“If we compare ourselves to other Atlantic Canadian cities per capita, we have a demand for about 1370 units downtown. That hasn’t been developed because there’s been no space to do it. [Because of] parking lots. If we begin to put those units into the downtown core, they want food services, they want restaurants, they want the pubs, they’re the people that are going to use that downtown stuff,” he said.
Scott said the downtown core is particularly attractive to older people who are downsizing and younger professionals without families.
“Basically in a city you try to create successionary housing markets. You might move from a rental unit to a home, and then you move through and then you end up back in some kind of rental unit,” he said. “Aside from that, by the time we look at new public plazas that are developed, new civic assets, new markets, potentially a new library some day, that changes the whole notion of downtown. It becomes more interesting.”
Councillors were generally supportive of the plan. Councillor Paulette Thériault said the plan is a “wonderful guideline for a downtown,” but noted that it’s important not to neglect neighbourhoods near downtown that are in need. These neighbourhoods include the area around Aberdeen Park on the corner of St. George and Botsford Streets, among others.
Bill Budd, the city’s Director of Urban Planning, suggested creating a reserve fund so the city can tackle neighbourhood plans in the future. In the meantime, City Manager Marc Landry said staff will be meeting with stakeholders and property owners in those neighbourhoods to talk about future plans.
Mayor Dawn Arnold said having the downtown improvement plan is “extremely helpful” to show the city’s vision to investors.
“This is the expectation today for growing and successful cities to have those public gathering spaces and to have that dynamic and vibrant downtown. So it’s worth the investment. It pays a dividend. We know that the heart of the city, when it’s beating as efficiently as possible, can fund all of those other things that we’re looking for in our community,” she said.
The plan still needs the by-law for its adoption to be reviewed by the Planning Advisory Committee.