The City of North Vancouver is taking some wobbly first steps toward developing the grandiose vision for the central waterfront that both dazzled and dismayed when it debuted in February.
The plan for a skating rink, water features, amphitheatre and ferris wheel made its return to council Monday night, with it, 41 recommendations that range from the big-ticket attractions to the more prosaic beautification projects and business marketing.
Council hired consultant Roger Brooks to develop the plan in consultation with local businesses and community members last year. Brooks' estimated cost: $30 million.
Though staff originally recommended nixing the shoreline water fountains and the privately funded ferris wheel, council tweaked its plans to leave the two attractions on the table, at the request of Coun. Don Bell who said he'd warmed to the idea after checking out Seattle's ferris wheel.
Coun. Craig Keating urged council to go one step further and endorse all 41 recommendations and have staff come back with a report on how the city can pay for the plan with internal borrowing and an eye to repaying the loans with revenue generated from the city-owned commercial space in the Shipyards. In his final plea to council, Brooks urged the city to adopt the plan wholesale lest it be picked apart to nothing in an attempt to make it please everyone.
"I don't get too many people contacting me saying 'Coun.
Keating, please slow down on that waterfront.' Any further slowness would be glacial," he said, noting it has spent 10 years as an industrial wasteland. "People want us to move forward on this."
But that was simply going too far and too fast for the majority on council who wanted to see more staff parsing of Brooks' recommendations and more financial detail before making any decisions.
"Mr. Brooks isn't paying, is he?" Coun. Rod Clark remarked. "I'm here on behalf of the taxpayers of the City of North Vancouver and I want to know what it costs. I want to know what the business plan looks like and what the attendant costs to that business plan is going to be."
Coun. Pam Bookham agreed. "I think it's extremely cavalier to simply expect council to buy into a $30-million vision that could easily cost even more and say 'Staff, make it happen,'" she said.
"I think our taxpayers would be absolutely apoplectic if they read in the North Shore News in the next edition that council authorized staff to go out and spend $30 million."
But Coun. Linda Buchanan retorted that the naysayers were jumping to conclusions and putting the rest of the plan in jeopardy.
"I don't think by saying we are recommending all 41, it is a licence to spend $30 million. Of course we should be prudent. Of course we'll wait for staff to tell us how we can pay for it," she said. "We're not going to expropriate any money without being sure that we can afford this. But I think if we chop this up and only move forward in little pieces, it's going to be yet another conversation we're having three years down the road about how we're going to move this forward."
Seeing his motion go down to defeat, a dejected Keating chastised council for falling into its comfortable habit of hand wringing when being called to act.
"I think we're proving once again that, with the majority on council, this is the place where good ideas go to die. What we do is begin dumping on things. We find some way to rain on a parade. 'It's not good enough. It's negative. Let's throw that out,' he said.
Instead, council passed a series of motions including spending $250,000 for staff to begin determining how feasible the recommendations are and getting more details on their costs.
The city recently announced that Tap and Barrel would be the anchor tenant in the Coppersmith Shop at the foot of Lonsdale starting in summer 2015. The historic Pipe Shop is set to be the new home of the North Vancouver Museum and Archives, and Presentation House Gallery is preparing to move to the foot of Lonsdale in 2017.
