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Municipality needs power to deal with derelict properties: Councillor Harris

Sep 6, 2017 | 10:11 AM

Derelict and vacant properties are draining the local economy says one Red Deer city councillor.
 
On Tuesday, city council passed a notice of motion from Paul Harris which calls for changes to the Municipal Government Act and/or the City’s community standards bylaw so that the municipality can have more power to deal with said derelict and vacant buildings.
 
“There are a dozen or so, maybe more, that are safety hazards for the community and contribute to the economic problems in districts,” says Harris. “There are a few in the downtown particularly and the downtown provides a lot of the tax revenue that supports the suburbs.
 
Harris says what makes sense is a bylaw to address these properties.
 
“This would have administration look at all the different options there would be to address derelict and vacant buildings, so everything from tax rates to expropriation to condemning to removal. Hopefully we develop a strategy that will help us deal with the real problem we have in our community,” he says.
 
Harris says while there is some skepticism about it, there’s something to be said about broken window theory, which was referenced during the meeting by Mayor Tara Veer.
 
“It’s not really rocket science — if you take an old building down that’s doing absolutely no good, it’s boarded up, full of mold, there’s graffiti all over it and you replace it with a cafe or a hipster shop, the whole street will feel different, the vagrants move on,” Harris says. “There’s less homelessness around that spot, there’s less crime, there’s more positive activity and that’s what we need.”
 
Property values will increase, says Harris, not just for those formerly derelict properties, but for the ones surrounding them. Harris says the oppositie effect is happening currently and it’s costing citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in lost revenue
 
“We can’t change the tax rate on a building at the moment, although that is something we’ve requested and so we may see new legislation come forward in the fall,” Harris notes. “We can only ask property owners to board up their buildings, we can’t do anything else once they’re boarded up. When you look at the downtown and there are at least three I can think of that have been boarded up — some of them have been boarded up for 20 years. You can imagine what the street looks like compared to what it could look like if we had active properties there.”