“It is time to be more proactive”
By Kevin Woodhouse
www.thesuburban.com
Empty storefronts in today’s economy are a reality and for smaller municipalities like Sainte Anne de Bellevue, having two or three chronically empty stores on the main street create a sad visual but Mayor Paola Hawa and city council want to do something to improve the city’s look.
“It is time to be more proactive in improving our main street,” Hawa told The Suburban. “It is tiring how some of the merchants and business owners have neglected their empty storefronts, making our city’s business centre look like a welfare state.”
City council will institute a motion to adopt a bylaw requiring merchants “more demanding criteria to maintain their facade which includes proper storage and use of recycling bins, removing collected snow and caring for empty buildings,” Hawa said. Another way the city wants to try and “brand” the main street will be to have the city’s Economic Development committee, chaired by Hawa, “to come up with branding ideas because while events that bring out families are great, they are merely band-aid solutions and simply holding events is not sustainable.
“We need to create ways to stand out and becoming a destination,” said the mayor. “We need to decide what we want to attract to the main street.”
Sainte Anne de Bellevue held its Winter Carnival last week and the three day event was very successfully attended, including an impressive fireworks display on the boardwalk Saturday night.
In another effort to spruce up the city’s main artery, council placed a reserve on the building in the eastern portion of the city’s entrance triangled between Ste. Anne, Lalonde and St. Pierre streets at a special meeting held in December.
The moratorium has been imposed so that the owner cannot alter, improve or demolish the
property that currently houses a laundry mat, a few apartments and an empty location that has sat unrented for many months.
The city will spend the next two years working on a plan and vision for the area. And while no ideas have been set in stone, Hawa said “there will be no talk of demolishing the site to build condos there. That is not an option.”
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