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NORTH
PARK NEIGHBOURHOOD NEWS Return to Issues and Events Index Published 5 times a year, this is the newsletter of your North Park Neighbourhood Association (NPNA), your voice at City Hall, and among other community groups in the Capital Region. The NPNA ensures representation of North Park's interests, and your concerns. Putting North Park On the Map Important Dates & Events Annual General Meeting NPNA Membership Dues Monthly Board Meetings Land Use Committee Meetings Renewing Victoria's Neighbourhoods Designing Green Neighbourhoods The City Connection Phone Contacts For Environmental/Recycling
Information
Pssssst…….wanna buy a plant!? Well, "buy" isn't quite the right word, it's more like "swap". If you are addicted to gardening, have promised yourself that you'll stop spending all your money at the nursery, but still desperately need to feed your habit, we have a deal for you. Come to the 1st Annual North Park Plant Swap. Sunday, May 25, 2003, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Bring any plants, gardening equipment, books, decorations, etc. that you would like to swap or give away. North Park Neighbourhood Association will provide refreshments. So start rooting those cuttings, and potting up divisions. On the principle of "Keeping it Simple", there won't be any tables, just tail gates and trunks for those with vehicles and boxes for those folks arriving on foot. Join us, rain or shine. For more information, email: ddfarley@shaw.ca or lorilust1@hotmail.com.
There is nothing boring about being part of the North Park Neighbourhood Association, as the articles in this newsletter will attest. We are continuing to participate with the City on two important committees:
Of immediate importance to North Park residents and businesses, are the upcoming workshops to address the parking issues arising from the expanded arena capacity. Details are outlined later in the newsletter. This is your opportunity to be informed about the potential traffic impact on the neighbourhood and to assist in choosing options to mitigate against negative impacts. The arena isn't the only thing happening in North Park. With the City's agreement to have the Canadian Baseball League at Royal Athletic Park (RAP), there will be an opportunity to make some upgrades to RAP. One of those upgrades will be to improve the fencing that surrounds the field. Work is underway to arrange for community input into the options for perimeter improvements. No dates have been set at this time, but it should occur within the next 4 to 6 weeks. There are a number of new developments under construction in North Park and others being proposed. This means the Land Use Committee has lots on its plate. A fundamental responsibility of neighbourhood associations is to conduct a process for reviewing new developments requiring changes to zoning or development permits. We are busy! While board members take on a lot of the responsibility for making sure North Park's interests are represented, we also need the support of residents to effectively do this work. You don't have to be on the board to help out. If there is any particular issue that you are interested in and could devote a couple of hours a month to, please let us know. For those interested in a more active role on the board, our AGM is scheduled for June 10th and there will be openings for new board members. Dyan Dunsmoor-Farley
Are you concerned about Arena "spillover" parking in your neighbourhood? It's been a while since Joni Mitchell penned her famous song, yet parking and traffic continue to concern people who live and work in urban centres. With the new Arena under construction, many of us in North Park are wondering where all the cars will go. If you are worried about how event parking generated from the new Arena will impact your neighbourhood, then be assured there is something you can do about it! Resident Only Parking? Special Event Parking? Permit Parking? è Pay On-street Parking? We need to hear from you! The City of Victoria has engaged the transportation planning services of an independent consultant to work directly with the constituents of North Park in our collective desire to maintain the "livability" of our neighbourhood. The mandate given to the consulting firm is to develop a Parking Management Plan which will work to find balance amongst the competing interests within the neighbourhood, and to find compatible, consensual solutions, to managing our on-street parking. We will be holding two meetings. Meeting #1 "Identify the Issues, Debate the Options" Activities: Date, Time, Location: The information gathered from this meeting will guide the development of a Parking Management Plan. The consultant's recommendations will be reviewed at a second meeting: Meeting #2 Review and Comment: "Recommended
Parking Management Strategy for the Activities: Date, Time, Location: The feedback will be incorporated into a final recommended strategy that will be presented to the City for consideration. Your participation in this process is crucial to the success of the strategy that is ultimately developed. If you cannot make any of the meetings, you are welcome to contact the consultant directly, to voice your opinions and concerns: Please contact Susan Hallatt, of Boulevard Transportation Group, telephone: 388-9877 or email: shallatt@blvdgroup.ca.
On February 25, 2003, the first meeting of the North Park Business Alliance, an initiative to build partnerships between the NPNA and local entrepreneurs, was held. While turnout was not spectacular, we did get a clear sense of the priorities and concerns of businesses in North Park. It will not come as a surprise to North Park residents that issues related to public drug use were at the top of the list. In the last couple of years, we have seen an increasing incidence of drug users injecting near business entrances, in public streets and alleys, or in front of private residences. Finding needles in the streets and parks of North Park has gone from a rarity to a nuisance to a potential public health threat. There is a growing sense that some parts of our neighbourhood are no longer safe and welcoming to walk through, nor good places to do business. While general crime statistics for our neighbourhood continue to be on the low side when compared to other neighbourhoods, we need to change the perception that parts of our neighbourhood aren't safe, before the perception becomes a reality. There was a consensus at the meeting that this is a health problem as well as a law enforcement issue. The NPNA supports the principles of the Downtown Action Plan announced by Mayor Lowe in January in partnership with the Vancouver Island Health Authority and the police department. However, we are concerned that there is not sufficient community involvement in the development and implementation of this plan. Local residents and businesses do not have the information they need to participate fully in the plan. They are not clear on how it will address the immediate problems of people shooting up in front of their office or finding needles piled on the roof of their building. They are not sure how they fit in to the plan or how they can make their voices heard. The NPNA has urged Mayor Lowe to begin that dialogue as soon as possible. We were very encouraged by the massive response to the movie "Fix" by the greater Victoria community. That demonstrates that Victorians are no longer in denial, that people are prepared to look at new and innovative approaches to drug addiction. This is a tremendous opportunity for the city to begin that broader public dialogue that our members and our local businesses are calling for, which we hope will lead to an ongoing involvement in shaping the response to these problems so that it is relevant to local concerns and informed by local realities. We have proposed a similar approach to the Inter-Disciplinary Committee that the City set up to address coordinated, integrated planning for the implementation of the Multipurpose Facility. In this instance it would involve City, VIHA and police representatives working with representatives from neighbourhood associations. We will continue to work with the city, VIHA, the police and local residents to make sure that North Park remains a safe, inclusive and sustainable community for now and for the years to come. Please contact the NPNA if you would like more information or want to get involved in addressing this critically important issue.
"Mosaics are timeless," said artist Sandra Millott in her Victoria studio. "They are art for everyone." Mosaics are designs or pictures created by embedding small pieces of glass, stone, terra-cotta etc. into a bed of cement or other form of fixative. The NPNA is collaborating with Millott on an application for a City grant to help pay for a community mosaic in North Park. The location and theme will be determined pending approval of the grant, at which time we will approach people in the neighbourhood for input. Why a mosaic? Millott, who holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art, and has also studied at New York City's Cooper Union, says there are lots of good reasons. "I love mosaics," she said, "They are a rich visual delight. When I went back to New York in 1996, I saw how they had taken back the subway system from vagrancy and fear by clearing the trains of graffiti and putting hundreds of mosaics at the different stops. It was a spectacular display that really turned the subway system into a beauty to behold; it went from being an embarrassment to a tourist attraction." According to Millott, mosaics have improved public spaces throughout history, from Roman baths and Byzantine cathedrals to the wondrous architecture of Spain's Goudy. She saw a gorgeous mosaic by the great artist Marc Chagall when she was in France, and one by someone anonymous when she was in Hawaii. As well as NYC's subways, the churches and financial district in Manhattan are an amazing spectacle of mosaic. Vancouver, too, is producing a fabulous variety of public mosaics. Here in Victoria, Millott has produced mosaics at Rebar Restaurant, the Cascadia Bakery, and the Worldmark by the Trendwest Building in James Bay. She has also worked on private homes. Her work is exquisite, and we hope that she'll be able to join forces with the neighbourhood to enhance the quality of life in North Park with art that is for everyone and by everyone. As Millott pointed out, "When you improve the environment, you improve the experience of everyday life."
As spring turns to summer and the cherry blossoms bloom, the outside façade of 1028 Balmoral Rd. will also be transforming itself. From June to August, we will be doing major renovations to the outer envelope of the building, including removing the columns from the balconies and other structural reinforcements. We expect the repair work to last approximately 2 to 3 months. You will see scaffolding and construction workers on the site, but no tarps. Our building is not a leaky condo, but our engineering report did recommend these repairs for structural reasons. Once they are completed, our balconies will be slightly wider and will have a more open view onto the street. So, if you walk by our building on the way to Mount Royal Bagels or Wellburns, take a moment to say hi and admire the handiwork of our construction crew. We'll have our new look unveiled just in time for back to school in the fall. Have a great summer! Don Innes, Strata Manager
One of the most famous maps in childhood literature is the one leading to buried loot in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Recently, a different kind of map leading to a different kind of treasure was formatted by the Community Mapping Project of GroundWorks Learning Centre, in collaboration with PATH, and representatives from North Park, Burnside, Hillside and Saanichton. Using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software, and with enthusiastic input from participants, the Hillside/Quadra community map charts important community landmarks, social and health services, heritage sites, bike routes and much more. The map will prove a valuable resource for everyone in the community to use. And North Park is the City neighbourhood whose entire boundaries are located within the map! It's going to be published soon, so keep you eye out for it. To find out more about Community Mapping, read an article by the project's coordinator, Maeve Lydon, at http://www3.telus.net/cground/lydon%20article.htm. A great site about Green Mapping is http://www.greenmap.org. Information about Geographical Information Systems is available at http://www.gis.com/. To contact us, write to: North Park Neighbourhood Association, #661 185-911, Yates Street, Victoria, B.C. V8Y 4Y9, drop by Poor Richard's bookstore (Corner Balmoral and Vancouver), contact newsletter co-editor Guy Babineau at guy.babineau@shaw.ca (385-3685), e-mail newsletter co-editor Erik Kaye at ekaye@direct.ca, or call us on our NPNA pager at 413-0541. |
