Does this plan include how to get around the city hall bureaucracy? Ask the owners of the keg. You couldn't pay me to invest in the downtown. The factors that have kept the downtown from being desirable are still prevalent.

More subsidizing of the downtown at the expense of other far better areas of PG with a much higher utility of return.

IMO

I was just looking through the old newspapers that are online through the Library web site. They now have scanned versions going up to the mid 1970s.

Makes for very interesting reading from 1967 or so when Centrum was unvailed (that era's version of "Smart Growth on the Ground" as well as the Commonwealth view of how the downtown can look).

Keeping it perspective, that was the era of the start of rapid growth. Three of the largest pulp mill plants in the world were just finidhed being built. The Inn, the Royal Bank highrise, the BC Tel building, the TD Bank, The Scotia Building, the Oxford Building and the Viking (HBC) building were all built in that era.

The Centrum Plan was done in a "partnership" (that term was not used in those days) with the DBA (Downtown Business Association) and the City. Even CMHC was involved with promoting low cost interest rates for "urban renewal" projects.


Even then they were concerned about the old buildings, the street people, the drop in the real estate values of the dwontown.

There was a fight between City Mayors/Council and Matte about subsidizing downtown. Matte was, of course, promoting development outside of the downtown area ... in his favourite Hart area where he had land holdings.

Thagt was when they created the 1967? Bylaw which zoned the area between 2nd and 7th and Victoria and Queensway to what it is today. There was also a lot of heated discussion around the building of parkades.

The way it was reported, some of those discussions at Council were much more heated than they are these days.

Then there was the discussion surrounding the location of the new Public Services Building. There was a proposal to build that with governemnt offices and a parkade on George Street where the offcies and the Hotel are now. It was to include ground level shopping. Now there would have been a police station that could have at least attempted to help deliver a turn around for downtown.

40+ years later .... same old, same old, except we are no longer growing at 4 to 7% per year as this city was for a period of 10 years.

The spin on the current one will be a much, much tougher sell. That is the understatement of the decade, I am sure.

way to go Gus.Guess you cant wate till the next civic election with all,the politics we get.

Cheers

"Ask the owners of the keg".

So have you asked them Imorge? What do you know happened or what do you think happened?

My first inclination is that the owners of the building are trying to do something on the cheap. Who is the professional Engineer/Architect of record for that building. We start there because they talk the technical language required to deal with working drawings, their approavl by the City building inspection and subsequent results of on site inspections as areas are uncovered that may not have been visible at first.

BTW, City inspectors do not view a building beforehand. They rely on the drawing information presented to them and those will get an approved stamp towards the permit, and then come the inspections. If anything happened during those inspections, as it might look like, then both parties have to re-look at the next steps.

If the problem is between the owner and the City, I suspect that conditions became observable during construction which surprised the owner and the design professionals and they would have to deal with how to resolve the issue.

That is, of course, just conjecture. The other aspect, of course, is any issues between building owner and the tenant. If anything cause the price of the structural part ot go up, there would likely have to be some discussion at the tenant-owner level.

Again, just conjecture.

Without further information, no way to jump to conclusion. However, I would not typically blame the City in this kind of case. The problem typically lies with the onwers and their design professionals or lack thereof.

the word on the street about this building has been - structural problems with the heavy timber trusses (engineer's "problem" to sort out at the time of doing the working drawings) and total amount of grease and other dirt in a building that has poor interior surfaces from a cleanliness point of view.

Can anyone remember back about 4 or 5 years and the Harris report on how to market the downtown? $140,000 I believe. Still have not seen the full report. It has disappeared behind someone's bookshelves. And I have asked many times. Still don't have it.

That turned to the shorter Black and White report or something like that.

So now we have another report for $50,000 or so.

It will be interesting to see who will be in it to endorse it and what their actual words of endorsement mean. I expect a full list of downtown proposals ...

- SGOG
- Wood Innovation Centre
- The Commonwealth Building + its proposed residential on top (if Commonwealth and the City have made peace)
- the new RCMP building
- the PAC
- the 4 plex on downtown Victoria
- the Ramada renovations
- the new B and B Music building
- some of the properties that are available downtown
- Keg upgrade
- Humus Brothers and Nancy O's
- new Veteran's Plaza
- District heating plant
- finally as much as they are able to release about a new wellness centre, assisted housing programs, potential Northern Health consolidated building, other activities around the 2015 Canada Winter Games......

And then there will be a section around the City as a whole that deals with services for people who are interested in moving here to start a business and work in new businesses.

standards such as UNBC, College, Hospital with new Cancer Clinic, new schools such as Duchess Park ..... Airport and its Boundary road light industrial development as well as the 4 lanes to the south connector under development. All make for wonderful visual oportunities.

Then, if they have done their work, one and only one contact at IPG who will be well prepared to lead anyone through the sytem to get the information being asked for and the proper connections. Without that, the thing will not have the same impact.

We have a lot of land that is waiting to be developed into housing, such as Tynor Blvd. both the East and West sides. Lower College Heights, Aberdeen Golf Course (Original Plan calls for 200 Houses presently has about 60/70) Foothills Blvd around the proposed new Golf Course so we probably have in excess of 700 sites that could be developed.

Are we to beleive that in addition we would also build more housing space for the downtown area??? Who is going to buy all these houses/apartments,??? Dont foreget we have an aging population and in the next 10 years we will have a huge number of houses coming on the market from sales by seniors.

You will note that on Gus's list above the major projects are to be funded with taxpayers money.

When one considers that Prince Georges population has been basically stagnant for the past 30 years, and indications are that it will remain the same for the next 30 years, you have to wonder why all the hallaballoo about developing the downtown.

Well guess what. The expansions South, North, East, and West are basically complete. Huge shopping centres, malls, housing projects, University, Cancer Clinic, etc; There is not much left to do in this town with its present population, etc;

So unless the City and Administration come up with a whole new plan on how to spend taxpayers dollars, they would have to lay off 25% of their staff, and reduce taxes. So this is about job security for City Employees, and contracts etc, for the private sector, funded by tax dollars. Nothing more, Nothing less.

Gus, you missed a key fact.

$50,000 has been spent not on a report but on a "prospectus". Surely a fancy word like that is worth $50,000. :-)

In fact a prospectus is a very poor choice for the title of this marketing document. A prospectus is supposed to provide true and full disclosure of all material information, good or bad.

Do the powers at city hall not realize the the global economy is in the early stages of coming out of the worst recession since the 1930's. It is hard enough to attract new money to areas with growth, never mind one that is stagnant at best like PG.

To offer ever increasing incentives in the hope that a developer will bite is idiotic. Knowing how desperate Dan Rogers and crew are, a developer with any brains will just sit on his hands and wait. The city should set a standing policy of say a 5 year tax holiday on any improvements- and that's it - end of story. When market conditions and the economy improve then money will start to flow.

To offer 10k per downtown unit sure is a stab in the back to the golf club.

Yes ... you are right Kolberg.

Of course I missed mentioning the KPMG report that IPG paid to get this City included in while Nanaimo, Kamloops, Kelowna and even the Victoria area was not included. That was a very smart move on their part.

PG rates high against the US because Canadian cities rate high against the US. The three cities named above would rate just as high and anyone who knows what they are doing would be able to see right through that.

I am assuming we are not talking about Ma and Pa businesses.

The key tool needed, in my opinion, is not a glossy come on, but the information access once you indicate you are interested in knowing more. How quickly can the information and associated contacts be tailored to your needs and how reliable is it.

Socialism is alive and well in Prince George. It is unbelievable that we have all these capitalist that represent us at two levels of government and then all we do is use tax dollars to try and drive the economy and as Palopu has pointed out in an area that has been stagnant for 30 years.

What ever has happened to free enterprise that should be driving our economy by supply and demand. Here is the City as the biggest landowner down town trying to suck in a new business with tax breaks and cheap land that will probably never make it because our population can not support it.
Cheers