City of PG addressing initiatives aimed at helping downtown

During tonight’s (Monday) Prince George City Council meeting, a presentation was given on a project that will measure safety, cleanliness, and inclusion initiatives downtown.

The main issues identified by some of this initial work included garbage, needles and biohazards, the perception of safety, opioids and mental health, downtown vibrancy, and the housing crisis as well as unhoused people.

Senior Manager for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships Chris Bone said this will help collect data they currently don’t have.

“While the City collects some quantitative data, like numbers of calls for service, we really haven’t completed a robust evaluation of our current service enhancement package, or any of our additional services, like the Community Safety Hub.”

Bone said this is a project created with funding from the 2021 Strengthening Communities Services program, and has hired a company Coeuraj to create an evaluation framework.

“The City is continuing to invest significant resources in a whole range of services to address the needs of the unsheltered homeless population, and also all of the associated impacts.”

“Yet despite all of these interventions, there’s frustration felt across all sectors that we’re not doing enough, and that we’re not solving the issue or the problem,” said Bone.

Bone added that they’ve been working with other organizations like Northern Health, BC Housing, and the Lheidli T’enneh Band to help design this framework.

“We absolutely have to learn, we have to determine the degree in which our initiatives are contributing to change, and we have to determine if what we set out to do is actually what we are accomplishing.”

Councillor Terri McConnachie said she took part in one of the events that had participants help create parts of this framework.

“It was enlightening to see how many of those services are being supported in some way by the City of Prince George. There were several times an initiative or service came up, ok what is it, who supports it, the City of Prince George does.”

Bone said they’ll be able to fully utilize this framework by September.

The City also discussed changing their public notices over to primarily their website and Facebook page, and they also changed over the name of O’Grady Road to Dakelh Ti, meaning First Nation Road.