City Council says the planned WIDC park is going ahead, but residents are still wary of the plan.
Downtown business owners say the park and attached bus loop will wreak havoc on an already delicate parking situation, while others think the park will be a hotspot for drugs and other illicit activities.
Former City Parks Worker Hannah Wilkins can’t picture a successful future for the park.
“In 5-10 years, it will be destroyed because there won’t be enough funding from the City to keep up on the constant destruction. There has to be a full-time City worker in one work to keep it up from graffiti and worse things.”
Wilkins spent several years working at PG’s Millennium Park, a known problem area for the City.
Unfortunately, she sees the WIDC park as a second incarnation of Millennium.
“It’s a danger to people using that park, like the downtown workers, people from the Ramada, etc., because there are needles left on the ground, they’ve been planted in the flower beds to injure the park workers, and it’s going to be constantly gratified.”
She added that it would be a huge undertaking to dispell trouble from the area.
“If you want a nice, pretty park downtown, you have to do a crime displacement. You have to push the crime somewhere else. You’d have to push the food banks, the homeless centres to a different area.”
Council says the park was agreed upon before ground broke for the WIDC building itself.
Construction is expected to start next spring.
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