The Downtown Nanaimo Business Association model isn’t working for the Old City Quarter Association, which wants the control over the money it generates.
And it’s not the only one.
Nanaimo city council has axed a matching grant to the Downtown Nanaimo Business Improvement Association, an organization that collects levies from downtown business owners and is tasked with revitalizing downtown, and put the money into a $117,000 funding pot to support individuals and organizations interested in holding events downtown.
For Eric McLean, president of the Old City Quarter Association, the money is good. His group will seek some of that pot, in an effort to keep this year’s Multicultural Festival, a casualty of the DNBIA funding cut, alive. If it’s a better model than the matching grant through the DNBIA and if it works remains to been seen, he said.
More of a concern to the association is getting control of money generated in BIA2, the Old City Quarter, now administered by the DNBIA. McLean said his association believes it’s better equipped to decide how to spend the fund, about $40,000, than those not invested in the area, and it’s requested council change the BIA2 bylaw to allow for that.
According to McLean, BIA2 was created at a time when BIA money wasn’t being spent in that area and from that time on, most of the development, sprucing up and effort into making the Old City Quarter what it is today was done by the association, like planting, hanging baskets and signage.
At one time, McLean claims his organization came up with a budget for how the money generated from levies would be used and it would be approved, but it’s no longer privy to the budget.
He told council last month that several small but important items have been missed.
For example, the association previously arranged for planters for flowers and shrubs, but it now has to be referred to a design committee and if it doesn’t meet or doesn’t have enough members no decision is made, according to McLean, who said planters are lying empty.
“Small things, but these were the things that we looked after when we had control of these funds,” he said. “When the DNBIA took over the budgeting process we were given no input, we were asked after.”
Dave Lawrence, a founder of the Victoria Crescent Association, believes the organization will also ask to control of funding.
“It has bothered us and it has bothered me for years that the tax money is collected from the building owners down here and us not really seeing a return on that,” he said.
“That the way this would pan out is if Old City Quarter gets theirs and if we got ours, you would see that none of us would be paid, the money would just go directly into improving the streets or putting on events and things like that.”