Go girl,
I don't envy you the job you have ahead of you...but wish you all the luck in the world.

I hate that word, "stakeholders". I always want to replace it with the "Anti-vampire league"! :-()

Active, creative and safe? Ha ha ha . Active with panhandlers and homeless people. Some annoying by creatively asking you for money and others just making you uncomfortable by just being in yer proximity. I can't see the formations of pawn shops, homeless shelters, needle exchanges, and other magnets needed by less than savoury individuals who mostly through no fault of their own are disadvantaged. Despite the honourable intentions of some lefty do-gooders. I'm sure there are right wing do- gooders too. But they are also war-mongers if brought unto a conversation with lefties. Like moths to a flame. Get rid of the flames and the moths will go away. How can I put this without being unpolitically correct. Oh, I know, they are non- consumer oriented individuals being downtown not to transact business in a retail sense. Buying drugs doesn't count. Safe? I guess that's the best of the third. Most indigents are probably the nicest people you are ever likely to meet. Their friends like them. That can't be all bad. Go ahead, Meredith, knock yerself out. If you get frustrated with the bums downtown and dealing with city hall, please let us know. This medium or any other way.

IMO Bogle is going to get boogled down with problems. lol Good luck, you're going to need it.

Maybe downtown will be underwater by the end of April and they can all take a canoe to the IPG conference to discuss how to fix the downtown.

Given the timing this appears to be something Meredith inherited. I am unsure whether Meredith would actually have come up with this so called "conference", especially the speaker, in order to take another run at seeing what is needed downtown after we have had the “beautification” in place for a few years and everything is still the same old, same old. .

In my humble opinion, the speaker selected, which would not have been done by Meredith, is the wrong speaker for this community and the wrong speaker for "downtown". He may very well be the right speaker for the VLA.

Diers was at a "safe cities, safe streets" conference in Calgary last year at this time. The site is still up and running at http://www.safestreetssafecities.com/pages/speakers_april4.htm

The speaker who we need is more like John Sewell, who spoke at the same session.
Scroll down in the top link and you can read who that is for those who do not follow the city planning and politics scene in Canada as opposed to the USA.

Here is what Sewell says about Official Community plans, for instance:

“OPs are vapid. They are full of empty phrases about “make every effort”, “achieving as much as possible” and so forth. As for questions of sustainability, built-form, and social mix, I am not aware of any plans in Ontario that contain the se kinds of firm principles in a way that would substantially alter the laissez-faire approach we now take to land use planning. The plans created by most Canadian municipalities are impotent little documents, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

Plans keep getting amended. In fact hardly a meeting goes by of a local council where the Official Plan is not amended. In a place like Toronto every meeting of Council involves about ten Official Plan amendments – 100 amendments a year.
The purpose of the Plan is to set the long term vision, to be a document that will serve as an instrument by which we make choices for the future. It is not intended to be a document which is amended every time the council meets, whenever some developer thinks he has another good idea.”

[/url]http://www.johnsewell.org/speeches/strangled.html[/url]

We have problems here. They start right at the top. No matter how much the person on the street or the small business man is prodded to activate themselves by individuals such as Diers, they will eventually end up in the same place – City Hall.

http://www.johnsewell.org/speeches/strangled.html