I can’t take credit for this particular idea; someone in town conveyed it to me.
This idea would take some money, vision and perhaps boldness, but it could in theory solve a number of challenges that we are experiencing in the downtown.
Before I explain this idea, let me preface it by saying that it has not been discussed at any length by council or staff, nor have we committed any funding toward it. We have not done any feasibility on it whatsoever.
It is just the nub of an idea, a glimmer, a quality it shares with all ideas large or small, or great or misguided, or ones that fizzle and die righteously, or a spark that leads to an even better solution.
I love it when people share their ideas with me; crazy ideas are often worth sharing and exploring because they can inspire and focus our collective imagination.
And as Mark Twain once wrote: “You can’t depend on your judgment if your imagination is out of focus.”
Two challenges in the downtown have to do with parking and flood protection.
Some people think we have a “perceived” parking problem; that really we have a walking and transit problem.
Others think our parking has become crippling and will only get worse.
For the sake of illustrating this concept, and the value of ideas in community building, let’s assume we have an existing parking challenge that will get worse as we continue to infill the downtown core with people, jobs, buildings and infrastructure, and our general population and tourism grows.
We’re slowly acquiring a coastal dike network through development.
These developments along the Mamquam Blind Channel and Oceanfront will bring us up to provincial standards.
But a dike is only as strong as its weakest point, and we have a large District-owned lot at Xwu’nekw Park on the Blind Channel between Victoria and Main streets) that will need to be raised to about four to five metres geodetic (it’s currently at about 2.8 metres) along the dike alignment, and then the entire block filled.
This combined would likely cost about $4 million-plus, an investment we will some day have to make if we are to protect the downtown.
So instead of simply filling this lot, we could raise it by building a large parking structure of 250-plus stalls with the park on top of it at the same height as the dike.
And the cost would not be much more, $4.5 million to $5 million. (These are rough “guesstimates” of course).
Ideas are the lifeblood of a community.
As Richard Branson says: “Capture every fleeting idea and drive for change.”
