Assiniboia welcomes Weyburn Red Wings with open arms during ammonia shutdown
5h ago
Billets were found for all Red Wings players in just four hours.
It has been four long months for a downtown Regina business that has been dealing with construction on its doorstep every day.
Working out of the first floor of the city’s North Canadian Oils building, Fresh & Sweet faces Victoria Avenue, where City of Regina crews have been busy all summer with a beautification project.
The infamous and long-failed Capital Pointe project had been clogging up the sidewalk and curb lane west of the building throughout the year.
On Thursday, the restaurant’s owners posted on Facebook: “We don’t really know what to say anymore — but this construction is killing us. Approaching 4 months of this — it’s not ok.”
Ward 3 councillor Andrew Stevens has heard the owners’ complaints loud and clear. Fresh & Sweet is among a group of businesses and residents who’ve told him about the city’s poor planning and roll-out of construction projects this year.
He said Friday he has passed on their complaints to city administration members already.
“I’ve catalogued concerns and suggestions that (they) have put on my plate in terms of how communications can be improved,” he said. “I advanced it along to administration for their consideration.”
Referencing Fresh & Sweet’s complaints, Stevens said arranging for two-way street patterns, like the one on McIntyre Street, could have been done sooner.
“For the longest time, it was still one way. There was absolutely no way you could drive, and it actually became quite difficult to even walk (there),” he said.
Stevens commended the engineers and construction workers who are doing the road and so-called beautification work, but he thinks they don’t consider “the human impact” of their work.
That’s why he wants city administration members and councillors to better plan, organize and communicate to the public each project.
“It would help for councillors not to meddle in the actual logistics of the project but to simply be informed, so if we get calls, we can rely that to the appropriate department and back and forth,” he said.
To that end, city planners need to also better plan for walking access and foot traffic around a given construction site, like the sidewalks on Victoria Avenue, he said.
The goal, he said, is “making sure people can actually get to and from those businesses.”
It’s another recommended change he said he wants to see next year.
But he doesn’t think businesses affected by lengthy construction projects should be getting tax breaks.
“We need to look at the contradiction in that,” he said. “You pay taxes to the city for a whole suite of services, whether it’s infrastructure, community centres, parks, et cetera.
“It really doesn’t make sense to give someone a break on their taxes when that money is needed to actually invest in the infrastructure that businesses and residents are asking for.”