Downtown Sudbury says it is frustrated with a consultant report on the Kingsway Entertainment District headed to city council tonight.
Rob Jones, co-chair of Downtown Sudbury, said the organization found the report, which favours the KED over downtown as a location for a new events centre, to be a “significant disappointment.”
“While we clearly disagree with the conclusions, it’s the supporting material and omissions of material that we find most (frustrating) egregious.,” said Jones in a news release. “We were told this would be a fact-based report, yet it is made up almost entirely of opinions and conversations with predictions of success on the Kingsway framed as fact, and downtown information ignored or dismissed.
“It appears as if this is a report looking for content to support a predetermined conclusion.”
Downtown Sudbury said the report ignores the detail of the parking issue downtown being a 9-5 issue, and that two large projects for additional parking and office space were shelved due to the choice of a Kingsway event centre. It ignores that Le Ledo is intending to build more parking than it will remove and that any business case for a new parking structure downtown is somewhat dependent on a new event centre.
The report further ignores the significant difficulty in Medicine Hat, which is offered as a success model for a non-downtown event centre, said Jones, referring to the Alberta city’s Co-Op Place event centre.
After moving its arena out of downtown, Jones said Medicine Hat “struggled for years to repurpose or find a buyer for the old downtown event centre, eventually offering millions in subsidies to pay a private developer to take the old arena off the city’s hands. Nearly 10 years later the centre is being demolished with redevelopment plans still in feasibility.”
Jones said the report also doesn’t mention the ProjectNow proposal from architecture firm 3rdLine.Studio.
“It ignored the ProjectNow proposal entirely and tried to substitute a renovation at excessive costs, and we still don’t know the answer to the question of whether ProjectNOW could deliver 80 per cent of the product at 50 per cent of the cost,” said Jones. “That could save the city upwards of $50 million that could then be invested in our infrastructure, and aging facilities.”
The report also doesn’t address what Jones said is “the post-COVID reality of decreased demand for commercial space and retail square footage, due to increased e-commerce and work-from-home trends.” A successful KED would be dependent on a massive growth of both retail and office space, and it is not a realistic assumption that that will come to fruition, he argued in the news release.
What the event centre report does say is that Medicine Hat has seen no significant development around their arena since it was opened in 2017.
“We could likely be next in a series of failed suburban arenas,” said Jones.
There is also a report by the firm Urbanmetrics that studies the situation and states that any growth will most likely come at the expense of increased vacancy in the South End, New Sudbury, Downtown, The Valley and other business districts across our community, he said.
“We have a rare opportunity to rethink our direction, given the largest change in global economic realities since the Second World War,” said Jones. “The red flags are being raised across Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and the world. Why does this report ignore them?”
Council will be discussing the event centre report tonight. Look for a report from Sudbury.com later this evening.
