I’m putting this forward and I must tell everybody that I’m the city councillor rep on the DBIA.
I sit and in all their monthly meetings and their get togethers once a month with their different merchants for an information session. During these meetings and I’m going to go back to 50 years ago when I was downtown.
As parking is an issue now, it was an issue 50 years ago.
We’re always looking to better utilize our downtown for pedestrians and businesses.
First of all, in all my years downtown, never gone through a cycle where we’ve had so many merchants move in downtown. And the mayor will vouch for me and other ones. We’ve been out to so many openings. We’re finally getting the downtown where it needs to be. We got merchants putting dollars into it. And I’ll tell you, they’re putting their dollars out of their pocket on the line to make a living. I don’t know whether there’s many millionaires downtown that own businesses. Some of them may have been more successful than others, but we don’t have many millionaires downtown. So, they’re working their butts off 9-to-5, 7 days a week, some of them six days a week because they can’t afford staff. So, our job as a down as a city is to support the merchants parking. They’re they’re agreeing to the parking increase from a dollar to a $1.50.
All they want is 2 hours free parking.
I’m going to sort of go on the person that comes downtown shopping. And I’m going to focus on the women more than anybody here, because if a woman goes downtown shopping, she goes into a dress shop, how many dresses do they try on? They may try on four or five dresses. So, are they going to do it an hour? And I’ll tell you, when that customer leaves that store because they got to go to the meter, are they coming back? No, they’re not. I’ve spent years in retail and we and I must say thank you to the merchants that have showed up down here today to support this motion or to show the support to get this motion passed because they’re the ones that are on the line here today.
You know, we talk about the number of events they put on. They put on as many events as they could afford because in the budget they have, the city gives them x number of dollars to provide for barricades or whatever every year. That hasn’t increased in seven or eight years, maybe longer, sits at $75,000.
So, Mr. Reed can tell you, that every year his cost supply those goes up every year. So how can they do 10 events when those three events cost the same as it did for the 10 events years ago because of the increase in cost that we need to charge to cover our costs?
So the only way they could do that is come to us and ask Mr. Reid to increase his budget. Again, going to be a budget increase. So it all comes back to the taxpayer. You look at the developers – how many stores has been developed over the last three years? How many have done renovations to put overnight stays in apartments in our city?
I think we’re doing not justice to the downtown merchants to not give them the two-hour free parking, you know, and I’m going to just ask our bylaw lady to come forward and I’d like to ask her a couple of questions, but while she’s coming forward, I got an information spurt here and I just want to read a couple of lines out of it.
But increased flow at a cost of reducing average shopping time customers if purchased increases a decreasing rate with shopping time in a negative sales for stores in the downtown area. Reducing shopping time higher charges reduces individual purchasing and thus total retail sales are affected. So again, it goes back people need time to shop. Should they be paying for it? You guys are going to decide that tonight. And I appreciate whatever way you vote.
My job is as a counselor to look after it. I’ve been in retail a number of years. These retailers are working.
