Amendment to Amendment: Add Gastown Cost Reduction Study

Thank you. Yeah, I... Appreciate Councillor Bligh's comments about making sure that we don't set up the downtown Vancouver BIA to fail and that we make sure we give this the best chance of providing a really good demonstration for staff and businesses and residents to see how it goes outside the World Cup. And we... I'm sure that we can find ways of doing this more cost effectively in future years. So I've moved an amendment to the amendment, and if you could possibly move me to an amendment queue, I'll speak more.

Thanks. Okay. Councillor Maloney, go right ahead.

Yeah, my amendment just asks that we add in that staff, look ahead and identify and evaluate potential investments, particularly aimed at engineering costs and security costs for the extension of the Granville Street pedestrian project, which I'm fairly confident is going to go through, and the long-term pedestrianisation and... of the Gastown pedestrian area in order to support the ongoing operation of these two initiatives. Because we have it on good authority that programming these areas is very important to their success. And we know that we need time to allow, say, for example, on Granville Street, but also on Water Street, for the mix of businesses to perhaps evolve and change to ensure the success, make it more family-friendly during the day. At the moment, particularly Granville Street, is very nightlife-focused and we want to make sure that we are... giving businesses the certainty by reducing the costs. I mean, it's not really, we have so many other calls on city expenditure and we know that this is not budgeted for in the 2026 budget. We need to identify ways, whether it might be identifying pedestrian zones that will be operated on a seasonal basis with any luck into the future. and looking at where we might be able to replace policing costs with retractable bollards that could allow deliveries in the morning and allow flexibility with closing the streets to cars and make sure that moving forward we're reducing these costs as much as possible. I don't think that we want to be aiming this at... the programming aspect of it because I'm sure that that's going to require input from the BIAs and arts and cultural organisations in the city for whom there's a fantastic opportunity with pedestrianised areas. But we need to reduce the engineering and policing costs to make it possible to have this an ongoing thing.

Thanks very much. I think we need a seconder for this. Councillor Zhou, thanks very much. Okay. Any further discussion on this? All right, I'll call the vote on the... Councillor Kirby Young, go ahead. That's the cue.

Sorry. Yeah, no, I appreciate the sentiment, but I think this work is already happening. Council has directed staff to look at, and we'll do think that in the capital plan, because I've heard commentary from the mover of the proposed amendment on both operating and capital expenses. And this pilot is intended to inform future years and what that looks like. So the learnings are important. Also probably good for council to kind of remember that we are at the end of term, so we cannot fit our future councils with respects to operational budgets. But I'm very confident in the work we've previously directed for Gastown. that that includes, and we'll have that discussion very soon on the capital plan, additional opportunities for things like bollards. I know amendments have previously been made that allow more flexibility for different neighborhoods to be able to stage these kind of pedestrian-friendly activations, particularly seasonally. And so I think that council, including the mover, can rest assured that that direction has been given, and we do need to delineate between the work of the cap on the operating plan. Thank you.

Thanks very much, Councillor Maloney.

Yeah, look, I appreciate those sentiments, but I particularly agreed with something Councillor Kirby-Young said a few rounds of council meetings ago, and I liked it so much that I wrote it down, and it was that a lot of this work is already underway, but putting an exclamation on it is never a bad thing, and I think that that certainly applies to my amendment to the amendment, that putting an exclamation on it even if it is the case that this work is underway, that it is not a bad thing and that I hope that my fellow councillors vote in favour of my amendment, just to make it super clear that in this economic climate and with this being an unbudgeted expense, that cost reductions, both in the short and long term, should be top of mind. Thank you.

Thanks very much. Okay, seeing no further discussion, we will now go to the voting queue for the amendment to the amendment.