Nanaimo city staff will be reporting back to council on ways to expand access to the vandalism relief grant for downtown merchants.
The program, established last year, allows downtown businesses to apply for money twice a year to cover costs of property damage from vandalism, but a motion put forward by Coun. Hilary Eastmure asks for staff to report back to council with “options to expand funding to the vandalism relief grant fund, and that the grant program be amended to allow properties/businesses to apply more than twice per year, and to receive up to $2,500 per incident, up to a maximum of $5,000 per year.”
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Eastmure said at the May 15 council meeting that she’d noticed several incidents in which the same business was vandalized more than twice and that it’s happened so often the Greater Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce, which handles the fund for the city, had already allowed a business to access it more than twice.
Expanding access to the fund represents a small change to the existing program, she said, that would be a tangible way to help deal with vandalism and window breakage.
“The more that we have businesses with windows boarded up for lengthy periods of time the worse it looks and it’s a waterfall of negative impacts from that,” Eastmure said.
She suggested $75,000 that has been committed by the province to help create the downtown safety action plan might be applied to the vandalism relief fund instead.
Coun. Sheryl Armstrong said she doesn’t have an issue with the provincial money being earmarked for vandalism relief, but opposed the relief fund only being available to downtown businesses, saying a north-end business shut down because of vandalism.
“They’ve just gone out of business because they can’t afford it, so I think it’s grossly unfair, as I’ve said before, that we’re only looking after downtown businesses and not the rest of the city going through the same type of vandalism… she said. “I think we need to expand this program to all businesses.”
Councillors Ian Thorpe and Janice Perrino agreed with Armstrong. Thorpe said instead of asking for a staff report now, it might be better use of staff’s time to wait and bring it up during budget deliberations this fall.
Coun. Erin Hemmens noted that possible expansion of the vandalism relief program to other parts of the city is already something city staff will be reporting on at a later date.
“In the meantime, I think this is a really practical way to support businesses that are being hit again and again,” Hemmens said.
Coun. Tyler Brown said he is interested in seeing a report on how the program has been utilized by downtown businesses.
“I think that’s important because I want to have a good sense of that before we start talking about what expansion might look like city-wide, because we could find out that this program is being accessed to such a degree that expanding it city-wide is just not possible,” he said.
Eastmure’s motion passed unanimously.
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chris.bush@nanaimobulletin.com
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