Municipal council will make one of its biggest decisions of its term tomorrow night.
Councillors will either scrap the proposed downtown arena or vote to expropriate local businesses and take the land for the project.
Local lawyer Kim Wolff is one of the people set to testify against the downtown arena project.
His law firm with partner Ryan Taitinger is one of the properties the city could expropriate.
He says the project is a big risk.
“Because what the expropriations will do is, in essence, sterilize one to two entire city blocks right in your downtown core,” he said, “basically for speculation [as to] whether the arena project is something good or not, or can even proceed.”
Wolff says the city is wrong to say it needs to own the land before it can ask companies to submit their proposals.
“The site’s already identified; everybody knows where the city’s proposing to put the arena,” he said. “So now that the cat’s out of the bag, why do you need to expropriate to proceed to put out the request for proposals? It doesn’t make sense.”
He says at the provincial expropriation hearing, reports from the four shortlisted companies only said they needed to know where the site would be – not have the city in possession of the land.
Wolff says even though he doesn’t want his firm expropriated, that doesn’t mean he’s against change.
“I, myself, personally, think that redevelopment and revitalization of our downtown core is a good thing,” he said. “I think it’s an important thing.”
“The real question we have here is – is this particular catalyst project the way to go?”
The city claims it’s done its due diligence to make sure an arena would work at Franklin and Morrison.
April 8, 2013
