Downtown improvements on the way: City

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This article was published 27/05/2022 (1580 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon’s mayor is optimistic after city council adopted a series of recommendations meant to improve safety, business and people’s wellness in the Wheat City’s historic downtown.

The downtown safety and wellness task force presented an initial 12 recommendations to Brandon City Council at its May 16 meeting.

The recommendations are preliminary, Chrest said, and are “quick work” the city can do in the short term before the task force comes back with more recommendations, he said.

Included in the list are items such as reinstalling 20 benches downtown and across the city, buying more garbage and recycling bins for the neighbourhood and creating a graffiti management pilot program. The recommendations also include proceeding with the downtown ambassador program, spending maximum $50,000 to rehabilitate downtown sidewalks and adding a four-month security patrol for Princess Park and the Kristopher Campbell Skate Park.

“We do maintain downtown, we believe it needs some enhancement of those issues,” Chrest said.

The task force was created in the fall of 2021 with an eye on improving downtown safety, business and people’s wellness. The aim is to identify issues relating to the perception of safety in the downtown core and look toward creating a long-term action plan.

Chrest first announced the task force in his 2021 state of the city address a year ago.

Many of the recommendations are things there is already money for in the 2022 municipal budget, but others could come next year.

The list also includes city administration investigating a “holistic plan for downtown public washrooms,” looking at enhancing lighting downtown to improve safety and security and investigating a sharps enhancement program for the neighbourhood to increase access to sharps disposal sites.

“That’s not where it ends,” Chrest said.

“This is sort of the almost quick wins the task force could recommend, things that could be implemented fairly readily and easily.”

The task force is now working on more significant recommendations that need help from other levels of government or outside organizations, he said.

“We didn’t want to wait until the task force had all of their recommendations in … so the things that can be done quite soon, let’s get started and start to make a difference in some of these things.”

The first group of recommendations is the “tip of the iceberg,” said task force chair Tim Silversides, and the money was already allotted in the city budget. The initial recommendations were identified in the early days of the task force as areas that needed attention.

“It’ll help improve the safety, it’ll help improve the wellness in the downtown community and … the business community will benefit, too. You’ll see more traffic downtown and it’s just win-win-win,” he said.

There’s still heavy lifting to do, but the recommendations getting adopted is a good first step.

“If you’ve got a healthy downtown, you’ve got a health community.”

The task force will continue to meet and start looking at some of the more complicated issues facing the neighbourhood.

The goal is to send a signal the community and city council cares about downtown and a positive message to residents and businesses in the area, he said.

“It’s certainly not the be-all and end-all, but it’s going to be just incremental initiatives and building on that.” 

Chrest didn’t have a specific timeline of when the task force would present more recommendations to Brandon City Council when asked on Friday, but estimated it would be a matter of months.

“We know there’s an urgency to this and they want to keep moving this forward.”

» dmay@brandonsun.com

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