What's going on at the Confederation Court Mall?

Lou’s right - sprawl is the result of a tax issue and something that PEI Dept. of Treasury should start addressing. Taxes must reflect the exact cost a development is exerting on society. If new developments say, out in Emyvale or Dunedin (my personal beef - two of my friends just moved out there in new developments which should never have been approved), then those new developments should pay for future road deterioration, some type of rate for depleting local groundwater, contributing to septic, more cost for electricity, etc. Existing farms and perhaps residential properties built before a certain period could be grandfathered in and everything afterward get the higher rate to make it prohibitively expensive and force people to cluster. It’s not only taxes though. Taxation will alter people’s behaviour but there needs to be province-wide organization on these combined issues: transit, highways/road improvements, retail development, industrial development and residential development. So it appears that petty politics is driving development policies, something which is likely evident in many PEI municipalities on one scale or another. Very earth-shattering indeed. I’d advocate removing all planning & development from the various municipalities and see it centralized in a province-wide impartial agency (is that possible?). I don’t really care whether it’s under the provincial government or arms-length (like IRAC - I had thought they were supposed to be involved in this area?), but we have to move on from the thus-far disastrous effects where we’ve seen: - sprawl/subdivision of the countryside - approval of low-quality developments. We have a huge number of cheaply-built wooden-framed, vinyl siding apartment buildings. Why not mandate developers to build using more durable concrete (like in Halifax and other centres) & better external aesthetic designs using brick, stone, etc., with a set number of units set aside as condos, some as higher-end rentals, some as mid-range rentals, and others in the same development subsidized at lower rates for social housing? Vancouver and many other municipalities are doing this - they even mandate that a developer who builds a large enough development, include the design and building of schools and stores to support the new population there. We didn’t see that in West Royalty did we, where Bell Heights and all those new subdivisions went in and parents started complaining about bussing their kids all the way into town and demanded the province build a new school - so the gov’t did at taxpayer expense… - this is somewhat tied in with sprawl, but within municipalities we have very poorly-sited developments such as those townhouses along University Ave. which are an incredible eyesore, or the building down on the waterfront between HMCS Queen Charlotte and the bridge, or the old school which was turned into a boat in Borden, etc. These developments wouldn’t look so bad if they were part of an overall development for those areas (including streetscape changes) but right now they’re awful looking. We’re lucky in many ways that we’re an island and everything we do within our shores is our jurisdiction - we don’t share a boundary with any other province/state, so why not use that to advantage and remove the local politicking etc. from development and go to a big picture province-wide approach where we could have a team of expert architectural, engineering, evironmental, and heritage/conservation professionals do the work. PEI is small enough that we should have an overall official plan and all zoning etc. should be island-wide to promote good developments in our existing cities, towns and villages while ensuring agricultural areas remain viable. Any proposed developments would be handled by the agency professionals and then have some type of input from the public through a collaborative e-citizenry concept (Minnesota is a pioneer in this). Probably a very scary concept for municipal politicians though, to remove the development power from their hands! I think once you start concentrating the population and getting rid of the commuter society then places like Confederation Court Mall and Waterfront Mall will be successful. I also like Peter’s concept of an indoor market - it’d be nice to have downtown Charlottetown and Summerside versions of the Saint John City Market which could be supported by a vibrant urban residential communities in those municipalities, and by residents in the rest of the outlying areas connected by an efficient transit system.

The commercial heart of PEI is now spread out along University Ave. for 5K, because City Councillors want to flex what little muscle they have by undermining the planing process. “Look at me I got enough power to make it happen for you!!” Our present civic council is probably the worst in many years and its being used constantly and loving it. Ritchie’s absolutely correct - there’s a reason why planning and development officers have bailed out from the city corporation in recent months/years, and it isn’t necessarily because of the salary. One planner I knew, who will remain nameless and is no longer with the city, used to get “visited” in his office on average about 10-15 times/week by a certain councillor, who will remain nameless, lobbying for this development or that developer, or to get exemptions to the city’s official plan. One time I was in his (the planner’s) office having a meeting and the said councillor strutted right in, puffed up like a peacock and ignoring our meeting, and asked if he could speak to him (the planner) about an important matter… Take what you will from that. Another thing, in talking with friends who are in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning program at Dalhousie, and several others at Queens and Guelph, etc. - the word has been out for almost 5 years among the nation’s graduating planning students to avoid getting employment with the City of Charlottetown at all costs. The political interference and cronyism, and lack of integrated development planning with an ineffective provincial government in controlling the growth of suburbs and exurbs is well known among most planning schools. Most cities in Canada hire planning students on co-op terms to do a lot of the nitty-gritty work in planning/implementing developments and growth strategies during the summers - again Charlottetown is on the black list for reasons stated above.

A market would be a good idea, but how would you make people come?.. that mall on a Saturday morning is like a ghost town. I like the structure of this mall… I like how from the outside it doesn’t look like there would be anything behind those shop windows. I hear a lot of comments from tourist who are “wowed” with the idea of the open space in there. It doesn’t remind me of any mall like the flat, one level malls you see some places (including out own at the other end of town)

I agree with Ritchie. The blame for the state of the downtown in general has to fall, in large part, on City Hall. Can anyone point to anything substantial that’s been done to stop the slide? I would love to see some bold steps. Free two hour parking — anywhere. Massive property tax cuts in the core. Investment in infrastructure. A solution, of some kind, to the University Ave bottle neck. Public transit. Cut the red tape on residential development. The private investment, residents, and customers will follow. Get crackin’! Perhaps these suggestions are entirely the wrong approach. But I just want to see someone step up and say “we’re taking an entirely new approach”. I had a certain councillor tell me with a straight face that our downtown was essentially perfect, and that a particular developer was going to ruin it all — or that was the gist of what he said, more or less. Does not inspire confidence that anything will change.

People choose to live where they want, what’s so wrong with that? If downtown has less business it’s because no one shops there. They choose to shop somewhere better. Why shop where the parking is bad, farther from where you live, with less selection and higher prices? They should have forced WalMart to locate exactly where the Atlantic Technology Centre is. Turned a loser into a winner.

OK Lou, you make a point about the public impact, and it is well taken. The choice here is in the city with more taxes, or in the suburbs with less land tax. So people avoid the higher taxes and the downtown suffers for it. The city has priced themselves out of the market. Or the suburbs are under taxed. Either way, the growth is in the suburbs. The only tax free place to live is on the ice in a fish shack, but that only gets you through winter. Then you could raom the beaches all summer, but who’d want to do that? Hmmmm.

It would seem to me, as a heated indoor space with plenty of seating, the Confederation Court Mall offers something that no other space in Charlottetown does in the dead of winter: a sort of “village square.” Surely it would be possible to leverage this into business in the winter months?

I agree with Peter. I’ve always thought the big square in the center of the mall (the seating of the food court) would make an ideal indoor market on the weekends. With so many entrances and ways up to there I would think it would work well. That being said, I also agree with Steve. I find malls weird and generic.

sorry, wrongkeyitis…There is no will on Council to do anything serious about downtown and its being lead around on by special interests and making decisions based on short term political goals. It does not matter whether these decisions are about snow removal, development or heritage.

It could be that the economy is hurting too. Our top industries are suffering or just plain dying, and our government is out of money. I had a friend that worked in one of the big box stores during the back to school season and their sales were down to a fraction of what they were the year previous for the same period.

Couple of somewhat related things are contributing I’d say: 1) sprawl Whatever happened to the Roundtable on Land Use attacking this problem in PEI? We now have even more subdivision happening of the countryside and you can find “ribbon development” along all the rural roads around Summerside and Charlottetown. You only have to drive the Blue Shank or out to Abram’s Village, or go out through Emyvale, North Winsloe, Suffolk, etc. in that supposed “controlled development zone” (at least Charlottetown’s version of the which is labelled a failure) to see this happening. And now I see where they’re going to subdivide the area east of Greenwich - one of the fastest eroding coastlines in eastern North America. Brilliant. I guess if Charlottetown wants an urban area stretching to the edge of the national park and out to Brookvale and east to Pownal, we’re going to get it, one way or another. Summerside has pretty much built right across their isthmus, but it’s not like they had much land to go with there anyway. It’ll also get mightily expensive for local ratepayers to get all those roads paved, plus the damage from umpteen thousands of wells and septic systems, so they’ll have to have central water/sewer - another expense - plus you need to set aside a huge area for new well fields for these new developments. That’ll piss the farmers off when they’re told they can’t even change the engine oil in a tractor, much less farm potatoes within 20 feet of a stream, or run cows through a marsh. 2) big box We aren’t concentrating our retail areas enough and are just letting any developer come in and throw these monoliths down all around the perimeter. It’s the same old argument. My grandparents recall how the downtown merchants (which included Eaton’s and Holman’s at that time) complained about the first shopping centre - the Royalty Mall - going in back in the 50’s. They filled in the pond and built it only 1 km from downtown, and now it’s pretty much out of date and useless. Then the Charlottetown Mall went in and Towers Department Store pretty much killed Holman’s and Eaton’s off (in PEI at least), although Holman’s and others countered by building Confed. Court which held its own for a while. And West Royalty was only 3 km from downtown. Now the big box retailers set up in the old sand pit behind Rodd’s Royalty Inn are too crowded, so the new development hotspot in South Winsloe out at the Arterial Highway almost 5 km from downtown are going to repeat the effect. Confed. Court Mall supports office workers on their downtown lunch breaks these days and that’s about it. It’s the PEI version of a Scotia Square, or a Highfield Square out-of-date retail space. 3) transit and high density development This is the only way to save what’s left of things. I’d have no problem if the provincial government put in a firm urban boundary and prohibited land subdivision in agricultural areas. Let Hunter River, Victoria-Crapaud, Montague, Tyne Valley, etc. all build up within their boundaries, but prevent the single family dwellings spreading out all over the countryside. And get an efficient transit system going which can let people leave their cars in the driveway so they can shop and travel downtown without worrying about Queen’s Parkade being full.

The Island’s Thomas the Tank Engine junkies must be shattered at the news of Whipper Snapper’s passing.