The Downtown Event and Entertainment District (DEED) has not been handled well since its inception. Remember how they claimed it would not effect your property taxes? Well, that is a straight out lie, and Charlie Clark was forced to acknowledge that on Evan Bray 29 Sept @ 9am. In fact, for 30 years, the entire TIF (Tax Incremental Financing) Zone will not fairly contribute to the growth of the city nor will it honestly contribute the actual amount required to provide their own required enhanced services over this huge area (nearly the entire downtown core now!).
Then remember that your taxes have continued to rise for the past 5 years all while City Administration was taking profit from the Land Branch and buying up various over priced properties around this DEED area. So your taxes have been artificially raised and will never be reduced from here, and the money used was your money that should have been used to lower taxes throughout!
Beyond all this, the process to “select” this current location was flawed from the start.
Great effort was put into swaying people to the decision others wanted to focus on. For example, the DEED Project Manager stated that moving the City Yards would cost over $200 million. Then, after the other site was chosen, the City Manager openly told the City Council that it would cost over $100 million to move them and that this money would be spent regardless of where the DEED location was selected.
There are a number of existing development plans that conflict with the goals of the DEED, yet all are moving ahead independently of each other, but they all conflict with each other.
Everything is being dealt with as an individual silo of concern. Propose the highest density use in Saskatoon’s history for a tight downtown area and then ignore that other plans are going ahead to remove many lanes of street access in all directions, which will dramatically affect the ability of this facility to operate successfully. Then, do all this without addressing the largest traffic issue in the Saskatoon core, which is the rail lines that cross nearby and completely cut off access to the venue many times a day.
We should never have had a DEED discussion without first having a basic plan for rail in our city. Instead, so many want to ignore the elephant in the room to focus on just one thing.