It took a year, but the burned-out Jean Burns building at the entrance to downtown Nanaimo was demolished this week. The site will likely remain as an empty lot, leaving much to be desired as a gateway to the city centre.
There was another demolition in Nanaimo’s core this week.
The Downtown Nanaimo Business Improvement Area voted to bring about its own dissolution, expected to happen “between now and the end of the April,” longtime president John Cooper said.
The dissolution was favoured by all members of the BIA board and most of 80 business owners who crowded a standing-room only meeting to make their opinions known. The move came in the wake of Nanaimo council’s sudden decision at the end of December to halt more than $230,000 in annual grants to the BIA. Those grants matched the amount that the BIA received from its members through a tax levied on commercial property owners.
Cooper said the municipal grants had been in place for 16 years on a dollar-for-dollar basis that would total several million dollars over that time frame. The end to city funding came at the recommendation of an outside review of the city’s expenditures that found it was rare, if not unprecedented, for city governments to fund business improvement areas. The review suggested the money should be tied to a specific service, not the organization as a whole.
Consultants also found the Nanaimo BIA was huge by most standards, with Cooper agreeing it’s one of the largest in North America by geographic size, while the report noted that some of the most successful ones have been in much smaller areas — “sometimes on just one street.”
The Downtown Victoria Business Association does not receive money from the City of Victoria, said general manager Kerri Milton, but raises its million-dollar budget through a tax levy on landowners.
Milton is not convinced Nanaimo’s BIA was all that large. A rough count of blocks of varying sizes shows about 40 blocks in Victoria and close to 70 in Nanaimo, not accounting for the size of blocks.
“BIAs change and evolve as needed,” Milton said. “Victoria saw that happen 15 years ago and now the BIA is stronger than ever.”
The “unfortunate” cessation of city funds “gives Nanaimo an opportunity to rebuild as per the direction of their landowners and create a new identity, without having to rely on council, Milton said.
Victoria’s business association is funded by levies of 60 cents per $1,000 assessed value for most commercial properties, excluding hotels.
Nanaimo’s BIA is projected to have a deficit of about $68,000 on revenues of $484,000 come June.
The atmosphere in the Nanaimo Museum for the dissolution meeting was “pretty aggressive,” said Glen Saunders, owner of Flying Fish Kitchen and Gift. Two off-duty RCMP officers were on site and Saunders said a group of people seemed to block the entrance over the issue of whether property owners received one vote or more, depending on the number of commercial properties they owned.
“How can you please this group?” Saunders asked.
Cooper said it wouldn’t be right for the city to continue to tax members now, and the city agrees.
“Should the board choose to dissolve the society, the city [via the associated bylaw] would not have the authority to continue to collect the levy on the society’s behalf,” said city communication director Philip Cooper. The levy is based on the assessed value of about 700 commercial properties, with about 300 owners in total.
Eric McLean, owner of McLean’s Specialty Foods on Fitzwilliam Street, said the motion to wind up the BIA was passed 64-14 by his count. In his view, it was a vote of non-confidence.
“My take on it is that the retail component felt underserved by the BIA in the last five years,” said McLean, who has been in business downtown for 25 years.
He cited the BIA’s involvement in soil contamination remediation on Commercial Street as the kind of complicated issue too far removed from merchant-driven matters — addressing, for instance, the “scuzzy” appearance of the southern approach to downtown. The remediation issue stands out, the core review stated, while the rest of the BIA activities did not “appear to reflect a difference in scope or innovation that might be expected given its substantially higher revenues than those of most BIAs in other municipalities.”
McLean saw it differently: “They ended up with a huge mandate, a lot of which has been downloaded on them by the City of Nanaimo.” One business owner put it this way: “It’s great [the BIA is] doing a five-year plan, but I’m just trying to make payroll at the end of the month.”
Saunders would have preferred to see the BIA board “hunker down” and see how much could be done with the tax levies of about a quarter of a million dollars, instead of opting to dissolve, taking away the means of collection.
Cooper defended the BIA as “high functioning” and fulfilling roles that city governments do elsewhere, saying the drastic move could have been avoided with some co-operative planning between the BIA and the city.
“All I know is that my board is made up of volunteers whose only reason for participating is to make downtown better,” Cooper said. “The vibrancy of downtown is increasing, not decreasing.”
In a statement, the BIA said: “In terms of rationale behind the matching grant, it is widely accepted that a vital downtown core is the responsibility of the entire city and not solely the burden of the commercial property owners who already pay a higher tax.”
The impact on downtown of a disbanded BIA will be “hugely negative,” said Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce CEO Kim Smythe, predicting there will be a lot of things that won’t get done around the city. He said he finds the turn of events to be “shocking,” as the chamber was caught off guard, along with the BIA.
The downtown itself, aside from the entrance from the south, appears to be OK, Smythe said.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a wildly thriving downtown,” he said, but he goes there most weekends and finds it to be busy with shoppers, walkers and people going to restaurants. “There’s lots of potential for it to do way better.”
As for the BIA, “something will rise from the ashes and take its place,” Smythe said.
On Feb. 24, the city began accepting applications from community organizations seeking financial assistance from a $115,000 event pot through the Downtown Event and Revitalization Fund.
The deadline is March 31.
“The intention of these grants is to recognize the value annual events have in building vitality in the downtown and enhancing Nanaimo’s profile as a destination of choice,” said Nanaimo Mayor Bill McKay.
