Downtown is a community’s heart

Downtown is a community’s heart

We need to offer incentives for downtown development as well as more cultural activities. We need to utilize our waterfront. We also need to entice more people to move downtown. Hopefully as a new council we can look at incentive programs and develop a strategy for more downtown development. A key challenge is to get everyone working together. My first term I have noticed everyone works in silos and that will be a difficult challenge to overcome.
From the Journal Pioneer
Downtown plans need co-operation
Published on February 25, 2011


Can downtown Summerside be saved? Some city councillors seem to think it can and have offered ideas as to how it can be done.
Other than a street redevelopment project – was has taken more than eight years and is still not completed – and the redevelopment of the Holman Building, little has been done to attract business or even create an environment that would entice business to locate there.
Recently three city councillors, Tina Mundy, Cory Thomas and Frank Costa said Summerside needs a vibrant downtown and that a key component to any successful redevelopment has to include the waterfront.
This is not a new pronouncement by elected officials, but the interesting aspect about these most recent comments is that they were made independently of each other.
Councillors Frank Costa and Tina Mundy see investment as the key and offered ways to stimulate that confidence in the downtown. Costa said it’s important to support development throughout the city and particularly in the downtown because downtowns are “vital to how people view towns and cities. The have always been an economic generator for investment and they always will be.”
Mundy sees the need for the city to invest in its downtown to help increase the residential population there.
“This will strengthen the economy, make the streets safer and reduce the urban sprawl which is occurring uptown,” she said.
Mundy said encouraging investment in residential development will also increase the city’s tax base.
Thomas is calling for a master plan that would marry arts, culture and heritage along with recreation under one umbrella as an economic development tool. He wants the city to get away from events promotion and concentrate on programs and activities that would benefit, youth, seniors and people with disabilities.
More programs for more people will keep people here. Thomas said more cultural activities along the waterfront would bring more people to the area.
While these proposals are encouraging there are three other groups that should be included in any plans for downtown – Downtown Summerside Inc., Summerside Sustainable Tourism and Tourism Summerside.
Tourism can play a vital role in the overall success of any plan to resurrect the downtown and these groups need to be involved.
The one daunting task facing council is coordinating all of these players into one cohesive unit with a single goal in mind.