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Letter: When it comes to downtown Sudbury, the city has been doing everything wrong for 60 years

From the demolition of the Borgia neighbourhood to the decision to abandon Sudbury Arena, the city efforts to revitalize the downtown core always seem to go in the wrong direction
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Sudbury Arena. (File)

Recently, Councillor Kirwan posted a piece on his Valley East Facebook page entitled “Transformational Projects Always Overcome Opposition”. I do not intend to argue the veracity of this claim, but rather to demonstrate the potential for such transformational projects to cause harm. 

For all my life, what is now Elm Place has stood at the corner of Elm St and Notre Dame Ave. Those older than I might recall that this was not always so – that the residential Borgia neighbourhood used to sit on the land that mall now occupies. I would posit that this transformational project was perhaps the gravest mistake in our city’s history – and that we are on the precipice of yet another such mistake.

Many have argued that the Sudbury Community Arena has been downtown for decades (it opened in 1951), and that it has since done nothing to attract development downtown, but this mindset fails to acknowledge that this is not the role of an arena. An arena is a community centre – a place where the people of the city can come together and congregate. Its purpose is not to attract development, but to attract people – and to do what it can to help support a thriving hospitality sector in the vicinity as a spinoff benefit to the local economy. The argument in favour of keeping the arena downtown has never been that it will attract growth to the downtown, but that moving it would be to further invite decay into the very heart of our local economy.

The reason I say further is because Sudbury has been down this road once before. Many are right to level the criticism that our municipal politicians have thrown a lot of money into failed efforts to revitalize the downtown, but none of them bothers to ask the critical question of why these efforts have failed. So why have they failed? Well, these various costly “solutions” were aimed at symptoms of the problem, rather than the problem itself, which our politicians have consistently failed to identify over the last 60 years. Indeed, the ills of our downtown today can trace their roots back to early suburbanism and the political response in a so-called “urban renewal” project from the 1960s – one that included the destruction of the residential Borgia neighbourhood, and a subsequent decline in housing supply in the city core.

 Many have suggested that the mall has failed to retain retail in the core, but the reality is much simpler – the construction of the mall pushed people out of the core, and the retail merely followed them out into the suburbs. In other words, this city has been doing everything wrong for 60 years, and the KED is merely another irrational response to the perceived failures of policies that were doomed to fail from the outset – because these policies were the very cause of the problems they were intended to solve.

Transformational projects work only when they are built on a solid foundation – a foundation not of hopes and dreams, but of reality and demonstrable fact. Hopes and dreams create the vision, but facts help to ground the vision in reality, turning a mere concept into something more concrete and viable. Our council embarked on the KED three years ago with naught but promises of economic growth and tourism. When council voted in favour of the KED on June 27, 2017, they did so without so much as an economic impact assessment. 

It was not until nearly nine months after the decision was already made, on March 12, 2018, that an economic impact report was completed and published, and only because a private group opposed to the KED commissioned it. To suggest that our city council was negligent in making such a decision of significant economic impact without any assessment of said impact would be an understatement – this was an absolute failure of due diligence, yet council pressed on, determined to pursue this project, facts be damned. 

To be clear, this is intended as an indictment of council as a body, not of any individual member, but it would be impossible to deny that it effectively serves such role in regard to one member in particular, who has made use of a significant local social media platform to be a vocal and vicious critic of all opposition to the KED.

After the urbanMetrics economic impact report came the public release of the RCMP’s German Report in June 2018. Gateway Casinos was one of a pair of casino operators specifically implicated in this report, which demonstrated not only that the company’s casinos were among the most heavily used to launder money traced back to opioid trafficking activities, but further, that donations by Gateway to the governing BC Liberals, who subsequently turned a blind eye to money laundering activities, totalled more than half of all political donations within the province by casino operators during the same time period. 

In other words, this is a company that has contributed, whether unwittingly or otherwise, to a nationwide opioid epidemic that has had a significant impact on our community, and that appears to have bribed governments in this country to ignore these activities. Is this really the kind of corporate citizen Sudburians want as a community partner?

That is not even to mention Gateway’s ongoing financial troubles. In repeated efforts to get out from under significant debts, the company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2012, then again in 2015, but could attract no investors on either occasion. They later filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange on November 20, 2018, an effort that the company abandoned on December 27, 2019, announcing that they were instead pursuing a deal with Leisure Acquisition Corp., a company that specializes in helping companies bypass the IPO process to get onto public markets in the US. Leisure later backed out of the deal on July 16, 2020, without specifying a reason. 

This not only raises questions as to the long-run viability of Gateway, but also as to what extent local taxpayers might be left holding the bag in the event the financially struggling casino operator were to fail. Taxpayers are already going to be in the hole $100 million for an arena the city has publicly stated it expects to lose $800,000 annually. 

If Gateway were to fail, what additional costs fall to taxpayers, and what is then left of the KED? More than three years after the vote at council, we have yet to even see a financier tied to the project’s oft-touted hotel, let alone all the other wild promises from Dario Zulich for which we have seen no investor interest materialize. This suggests we could just be left with an overly expensive arena sitting off on its own in a lot on the edge of town. Indeed, Mr. Zulich had promised a soccer dome built by the Fabio Belli Foundation, to which the foundation responded by quickly issuing a statement that it had made no such commitments and had authorized no such use of its name. 

With such antics, Mr. Zulich has demonstrated that Gateway is our most reliable partner in this venture, yet the state of that company’s finances suggest it may be anything but reliable.

The KED is certainly a transformational project, but one must question if the transformation it offers is as constructive as promised. Is the KED really our next Science North, or is it our next City Centre? Or perhaps, rather than citing one of the most destructive projects in our city’s history, I might cite one of our more recent and more widely panned boondoggles, one which Mr. Kirwan himself inexplicably cited in his little list of our city’s past transformational projects – the single site hospital. 

Is the KED another Health Sciences North, destined to fail because of a lack of due diligence by political actors? I am certainly confident that I have herein demonstrated a significant lack of due diligence by council in addressing the KED question. It is not too late to reconsider the decision, lest what remains of my generation opts to abandon this city to avoid being stiffed with the exorbitant bill for this costly decision.

Al O’Neill, Former resident of Ward 5