Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - July 28, 2013, Winnipeg, Manitoba winnipegfreepress. com OUR WINNIPEG THIS CITY . OUR WEEKLY LOOK AT THE PULSE OF THE CITY A8 SUNDAY, JULY 28, 2013 LIVING IN WINNIPEG I T was November 28, 2011, and I was not supposed to be there. I looked down at the pool of water below my feet. It was sealed with a fragile blanket of ice, glossy bits floating, reflecting back the earth and sky like little mirrors. It was hauntingly still. Such a peculiar space: layers of colourful, edgy text covering every surface; shards of tiny glass glinting in the sunlight; abandoned shopping carts splaying over the bristly grass - static remnants of stories left behind. Then I heard it. To the outside world, it was barely a whisper, droned out by the endless bustle of traffic. Underneath, a shrill shriek pierced the air. I froze. A low, unsettling rumble forced the pillars to tremble in reply, and I felt my body do the same. Thousands of tons rushed overhead. I gazed at the scars in my concrete shelter, the deep gashes revealing rusty steel rebar. It seemed that at any instant it might have collapsed, but it was the only protected place. I was trapped. The only escape was climbing back up the steep slope and over the tracks. In that moment, I was untouchable. It was surreal, terrifyingly safe and serene. I clung to the side of the bank. All I could do was wait for the train to pass, for the chance to crawl out of my hiding place and be exposed to the world. The consequence of exploring the shallow waters of Omand's Creek beneath the BNSF railway bridge is awareness; beyond that of my physical self, I am conscious of time, place, materiality and fragility. of a whole other lifestyle and culture that dwells within Winnipeg's ruins and how forgotten, or perhaps ignored, these people and spaces are. The tracks, running parallel to Empress St., mark the division between Winnipeg's West End and the St. James area, beside Denson Riddle Park. This " little bridge" is a place of retreat and refuge, a place where friends can speak freely about their deepest burdens and curiosities, a comfortable shelter hidden from the incessant activity and harsh realities of the world. Albeit crumbling, it is an urban escape. I see beauty in its vulnerability. To me, it represents a microcosm of the greater milieu of our Winnipeg. Winnipeg's strength, as opposed to lustrous thriving cities such as New York, Montreal and Chicago, is found in its quirky intimate spaces and experiences. For me, Winnipeg is this bridge. It is the courtyard within 100 Osborne St. South at River Ave. It is visiting Bodegoes in the Exchange District for chicken fingers and a cold glass of Original 16 on a hot summer evening. It is street festivals, ice- skating on the river and staging photo shoots against dilapidated warehouses. Winnipeg is going to a hockey game or local band performance and recognizing a third of the faces in the crowd. It is the smiles that are exchanged between people in cars at a red light. It is the little moments and places we know like the back of our hands, but that still surprise us. It is home. The " little bridge" that so largely impacted me is the catalyst for these conclusions. There is life in our city that we are not aware of. The smallest, crummiest spaces show the promise of innovation, of seeking potential in something weak or forgotten. Beneath the railway bridge as the train rushed overhead, I realized how close the structure was to failing, but also the sheer strength that fought to hold it together. Please do not climb under a rickety structure in hopes for some form of enlightenment. I share this story only with the hopes of encouraging my fellow Winnipeggers to challenge the negative perceptions of our city with acknowledgements of the small, personal, fantastic interactions. What do you value in Winnipeg? How can we promote the growth of these values? I believe Winnipeg is at a critical tipping point on the fence of debate: To crumble or to stay strong? What role will you play in supporting and rejuvenating our Winnipeg? Breanna Mulhall is a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture's environmental design program at the University of Manitoba. She aspires to use her creativity as a catalyst for positive change, employing her design mindset as a means of educating the public and critically evaluating social conditions. By Breanna Mulhall UNDER the bridge Winnipeg's strength is so often found in quirky places H ELLO, Winnipeg. Hope you're enjoying the summer. Now please put down that pint of lager, lift your eyes from your iPad and take a bloody look around at the mess around you. For all the wonderful talk about how far this city has come in recent years, poor decision- making has threatened to boomerang us back into the morass of the mid- 1990s. At the same time Winnipeg is running out of money, it appears insanely desperate to give up future revenues in order to pay for the stuff it has right now. The city's operating budget - the total amount of money we spend on all municipal services, from policing to plowing snow to killing mosquitoes with malathion - is $ 922 million. We pay for no less than $ 483 million of that figure through property taxes, which remain the city's single largest source of revenue. Like it or not, property taxes are Winnipeg's lifeblood - and not just because they account for 52 per cent of our municipal revenue. As the city grows, which it is doing right now, new properties add to the existing pool of revenue, above and beyond any tax increases legislated by council at budget time. As most residents are well aware, the cost of delivering services is rising faster than the growth of property taxes and every other revenue stream. Rising salaries and benefits are only part of the problem, as the cost of supplies such as gas are also going up. At the same time, the city gets less bang for every operating- budget buck it slides over to the capital budget, which is the money spent by the city every year to build new roads, fix bridges, repair buildings and purchase equipment. Winnipeggers have watched two successive mayors - Glen Murray and Sam Katz - try and largely fail to convince the province and Ottawa to fork over more money for the cash- starved city. Though wildly different in style, Murray and Katz are oddly similar in substance. But only Katz is presiding over a strange situation where the city keeps mortgaging a portion of its precious future property- tax growth, often with the full co- operation of an equally careless province. The practice in question is an increasing reliance on unusual versions of tax- increment financing, a financial mechanism that can be extremely beneficial to municipalities who employ it properly and carefully. A TIF is a tax- incentive plan aimed at sparking development in a blighted area. Generally, owners of vacant or underutilized land or buildings in depressed areas have no incentive to improve their properties if they wind up paying more taxes as the result of increased assessments following the completion of their upgrades. Under a TIF, property owners who invest in their land, usually by renovating old structures or building up on vacant lots, are not penalized for making improvements. Instead, the additional tax revenue that flows from their developments - the " tax increments" in question - is either reinvested in the same neighbourhood or returned to the developers themselves. At least that's what's supposed to happen in a pure version of a TIF, which politicians and policy wonks love because the new tax dollars they're spending would not exist if it wasn't for the new developments. The city and province, unfortunately, have banded together to support a series of TIFlike mechanisms that don't quite conform to the ideal. They may very well deprive the city of future revenue without providing all of the short- term benefits that were advertised. Chief among them was the pseudo- TIF that helped cover $ 90 million of the $ 138- million cost of building the first phase of the Southwest Transitway. The city borrowed all of the cash - $ 45 million for itself and $ 45 million on behalf of the province - with the intention of paying back the tab with the help of new tax revenues flowing from the redevelopment of the Fort Rouge Rail Yards, a vacant strip of former industrial land. The land in question is in the hands of a single developer, Gem Equities, whose owner has a track record of incomplete and unfinished developments. The city has guaranteed a $ 10- million loan to the company, which has machinery on the Fort Rouge site but has to date missed a series of development deadlines. In the long term, the city has a plan to reclaim the Fort Rouge Rail Yards should the existing developer fail. But in the meantime, the city is paying interest on the rapid- transit loan and won't be able to realize any new property- tax revenues until new condos and apartments actually materialize along this strip of land. And of course, that new revenue will pay for the existing 3.6 kilometres of rapid transit and will not help the city in the future - except indirectly, as new high- density housing in Fort Rouge will be cheaper to service in the long term than a new single- family development on the city's fringes. Of course, the success of the Fort Rouge Rail Yards also depends on the demand for housing in Winnipeg remaining high enough to support similar new high- density projects on the University of Manitoba's Southwood lands and in downtown Winnipeg. The latter area is home to another, even weirder version of a TIF: The Downtown Residential Development Grant Program, a city- provincial project started up two years ago to spark the construction of new apartments and condos downtown. In a pure version of a TIF, new property taxes would be returned to these developers. This program, however, offered grants up front, up to a theoretical limit of $ 40,000 per unit. The plan for the city and province is to recoup this cash from future property and education taxes. But since the cash was handed out at the outset as a grant, there is additional borrowing and risk at play. The downtown residential program does not require development to take place before the subsidies flow. This same mechanism is at work in another downtown grant program that pretends to be a TIF: the SHED program, aimed at improving the streetscape in an 11- block area of downtown dubbed the " sports, hospitality and entertainment district" by the folks at CentreVenture. In a pure TIF, every new development in the so- called SHED would contribute to the project and benefit from it. But this program is aimed at specific developments. Instead of simply creating market incentives for downtown, the city and province are picking and choosing which specific developments within that market benefit. And the program also results in the same problem: New property taxes from the downtown residential and SHED programs are spoken for in the future. The proposed Exchange- Waterfront Neighbourhood Development Program, which includes the controversial plan to write $ 10,000 cheques to condo buyers, has also been sold to politicians as a TIF. But it involves funnelling cash from all new downtown residential projects and spending it in one area - the northeastern third of downtown. And that's not the only pseudo- TIF at work in Winnipeg. New property- tax revenues flowing from the redevelopment of the former Canad Inns Stadium site in Polo Park are also spoken for, as the first $ 75 million in city and provincial taxes will help pay for Investors Group Field, Winnipeg's $ 200- million new football stadium. Faced with a shortage of revenue, both the city and province have increasingly turned to TIFs, justifying their decisions on the basis they are only spending revenue that wouldn't exist otherwise. To some degree this is true. But the future use of the mechanism ought to be restricted to only the purest form, where cash gets spent at the back end - not at the outset. bartley. kives@ freepress. mb. ca S TRESSED, but have no time to take a vacation? Even one great day of summer fun will get fresh air into your system and help ease that pain between your shoulders. Consider taking the kids to Grandma's and doing one of these four fun- filled dayhops - north, south, east and west of Winnipeg - or try them all! You'll leave the city for an adventure in the morning and end up back in Winnipeg in your own comfy bed, relaxed and restored that evening. We're BLEEDING our future By Maureen Scurfield Day tripper, YEAH! Great short jaunts abound in every direction BARTLEY KIVES bartley. kives@ freepress. mb. ca TIFs may be a great funding mechanism, but not the way the city is using them PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES There's not much tax revenue coming in from this vacant piece of land ( the former Fort Rouge Rail Yards) adjacent to the city's rapidtransit corridor in south Winnipeg. South " Get your motor runnin', head out on the highway! Lookin for adventure and whatever comes our way." Thank you, Steppenwolf. I'll take it from here. Up early, you're off to the merry hamlet of Fannystelle to investigate a quaint downtown restaurant called Sausages and Spankings, owned and operated by local character Cori Audet. Stop quaking! It's just a funny name, with a great breakfast menu, and the woman sells sex toys at parties. It opens 6: 30 a. m. weekdays and 8 a. m. weekends, closing in mid- afternoon. S and S is 25 minutes from Winnipeg on Highway 2. After that, you can make your way to Carman to enjoy the town's spectacular golf course or keep on going south to Morden, home of the Corn and Apple Festival ( August 23 to 25). In a mood for Manitoba dinosaurs? Check out the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre, found in the lower level of the Access Event Centre as you enter town. Morden is located on the lake bed of the mighty glacial Lake Agassiz that used to cover most of Manitoba before it receded and left puddles like Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba. A few million years before that, it was a tropical seabed. See an amazing collection of marine reptile fossils. You'll love " Bruce," the 13- metre, 80- million- year- old mosasaur, the largest found in Canada. He liked to swim in the sea you are standing on. Time for a dip now? Check out Lake Minnewasta, a man- made lake created by damming the Dead Horse Creek more than half a century ago. Cooled off and ready to go adventuring? Drive further west on Highway 3 to picturesque Holiday Mountain, outside La Rivi�re, to bike, golf and/ or zip- line. There are parallel zip- lines here, so people can race! Golf carts take you up to the top of the hills, so there's no exhausting uphill climbs. Speaking of golf, the Holiday Mountain golf course is highly unusual for the Prairies - built on the bottom and sides of the ski hills, with a sensational hole where you hit your ball off a cliff. On your way home, you can hit the Starlight Drive- in theatre near Morden for a movie. East " Life is a highway, I wanna ride it all night long." Thank you, that'll be enough, Tom Cochrane. You're heading out on Trans- Canada Highway East with the Royal Canadian Mint shining like an outmoded penny nearby. You may want to stop for go- kart racing or mini- golf at Grand Prix Amusements just to get yourself jazzed up. Your major move is to drive 40 minutes down the highway and veer south on Highway 12 past Ste. Anne's heading towards the rapidly growing city of Steinbach. Just short of the city, turn left at Clearspring Road and hang a tight right down the parallel service road. Then deke between businesses marked 275 and 277 and find hidden Hangar 289. Here at this colourful playhouse/ hangar you can go to for a tandem ultralight ride with pilot Barry Morwick. Call Adventure at Altitude at 333- WING to reserve. Lunch is at Cherry Hill Estate, which means a three- minute drive ( east) off Highway 12. Go down Park Road past the Quarry Oaks golf course. A few minutes later, in the middle of farmland, you'll suddenly spot an oasis. There's a pristine man- made lake with a geyser. Cherry Hill Estate and Harry's Bar, behind the lake, boasts a giant main- floor barbecue pit and a top floor and deck with modern stretch umbrellas that give you a breathtaking view over the land and water. Lunches and dinners range from barbecue to stylish gourmet. After lunch, you're back to the mighty Trans- Canada and off to Falcon Lake to golf, ride horses or swim on the sandy beach. North As bush pilots know, the outline of Lake Winnipeg at night looks like a necklace, with sparkling diamonds in a curve around the bottom caused by the twinkling lights of resort towns. Plan a trip north to hit the biggest open- beach resort towns such as Gimli, Winnipeg Beach and Grand Beach. And here's a hot tip: On Aug. 10, you can hit two big events in one day: the 15- team sandcastle- building competition is happening Saturday ( and Sunday) at Grand Beach. While you check out the growing castles, you can swim on the famous silver- sand beaches. Then slip round the bottom of the lake ( quickest route is Highway 59 south from Grand Beach to Highway 4, to Highway 9 back north). Roll into Gimli for a pickerel dinner and the Elvis Festival that evening, organized by " the blond Elvis," Dave Greene. West Your next day- hop adventure is a trip due west on the Trans- Canada Highway. You start out at Nick's Inn at Headingley for one of their famous big breakfasts and head off for Portage la Prairie. Whatever you do, don't stay on the bypass and miss the entrance to Portage la Prairie. Turn left at the lights at city hall and head for sparkling Crescent Lake on Crescent Road. Take the bridge over to the island and Mayfair Gardens, the golf course, waterslides and a pool for your late- morning swim. People have loved to canoe on the lake that historically held water- skiing events. You'll eat lunch at Bill's Sticky Fingers, famous for ribs, found at 210 E. Saskatchewan Ave. Call 204- 857- 9999 if you get lost. Lick your sticky fingers, wipe your face, and head west on the Trans- Canada for about an hour's drive, ending up in rolling hills. Look for a well- marked turn south onto Highway 5 heading towards Carberry. You're going to the Spirit Sands desert in Spruce Woods Provincial Park, with critters seen nowhere else in Canada. You may want to bring a harem costume. At the end of these day trips, you are a tired and happy person and you have me to thank. Take lots of pictures to show the people at work who don't have the gumption to get out of bed early. Maureen Scurfield is an intrepid adventurer who has spent five years taking people on exciting adventures. She accounts for her generally upbeat mood by always having a new one ready to go. GREG GALLINGER / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Breanna Mulhall poses under the railway bridge crossing Omand's Creek, one of her favourite spots in Winnipeg. SUPPLIED PHOTO Bruce, an 80- million- year old mososaur, lives in Morden's Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre. Jennifer Church ( left) and pilot Barry Morwick go for a tandem ultralight ride. PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES Spirit Sands at Spruce Woods Provincial Park JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES Grand Beach SUPPLIED PHOTO ;