2010 - The Year Ahead
by Michael Jenkin
2010 promises to be a busy year for OSCA. The big event will, of course, be the move into our renovated community centre which should take place at the beginning of the summer. But before that happens we have a lot of planning to do and not just to organize the big bash to celebrate the opening of the new Old Firehall. One of our biggest challenges will be to design the new suite of programs that will be offered to the community once we move in.
The renovated community centre will present a whole host of new opportunities for us. While we will have greater programming space available to us in the new facility, what is even more important is the greater flexibility we will have in running programming. In the past we were often significantly constrained in what we could do in the centre because each of the programming spaces was not effectively isolated from the other and often program participants had to go through one programming area simply to get to the program in which they were participating, disturbing the other participants, and this often happened several times during a session. Needless to say in such an environment controlling noise spilling over from one area to the next was a real issue. Often the result of such problems were that we could not use the centre's space to full capacity in order to ensure effective isolation from the few program activities that were taking place. We would also be reluctant for the same reasons to schedule adult and children's programming simultaneously. Now, with multipurpose program rooms that will be better equipped and have access to appropriate storage space for equipment we can use all the floor space that is available and we will be able to set up and take down for program sessions much more effectively and quickly.
A new kitchen and a much larger community hall also mean that larger community events and dinners and other catered events can be scheduled that were not possible in the past.
All this means new programming possibilities, new opportunities to schedule programs at different times and breaking old habits of assuming we can't do things because we either didn't have the space or the facilities to do something different. Our Program Committee will be hard at work pondering these questions in January and will be holding a strategic planning session on January 26 to start the process of designing a new suite of programs for the community. If you have ideas about what you would like to see in the way of new programming opportunities, given the new facilities we will have at our disposal, you can send your ideas in to Deirdre McQuillan at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
2010 will be a municipal election year in Ottawa, so we can expect to see the political temperature rise at City Hall as potential candidates for both the Mayor's chair and ward councillor's seats declare their intentions and stake out their positions on major municipal issues. It is likely that two big issues will dominate the agenda during at least the first half of the year: putting the funding together to launch a new light rail system in the City and the final vote on the Lansdowne Park redevelopment. The first issue is getting off to a good start with the Province's announcement of $600 million in funding, although there will be challenges in designing a system that will meet the available resources. But it is the Lansdowne issue that will continue to be a negative one for our community.
It is still very unclear exactly what the shape of the final development will take and how effective the supposed fixes will be. The major concerns remain the impact of the huge shopping mall proposed for the site on our local merchants, and the ability of Bank Street to handle the additional traffic generated by all the new facilities (the mall, the football stadium, the hockey arena, the multiplex cinema, the hotel, the new residential developments and the offices). Make no mistake about it; the consequences of this development for our community are very significant and potentially very negative. Engaging with the City over the next several months of studies and planning will be a major job for us, but the degree to which our concerns have been listened to up to now does not give me a great deal of confidence that the outcome will be a positive one for our community.
On a more positive note it has been confirmed that the traffic safety study for Sunnyside Avenue will be going ahead in 2010 now that there are staff available to conduct it. The community will be engaged on the development of the study and its implementation, so we should have a meaningful opportunity to make our views known. The safety study will then form the basis for developing proposals for traffic calming and the physical redevelopment of the street. This will be critically important as Sunnyside is one of the principal collectors in our neighbourhood and the main link east to west between Bank and Bronson. Bank and Bronson are two of the very few north-south arterial roads serving the rapidly growing south end of the City and are therefore subject to growing commuter traffic volumes and are, in turn, putting Sunnyside under increasing traffic pressure.
Finally, in addition to the Firehall, we should see another public facility re-opening in the late spring/early summer and that will be the renovated Sunnyside Branch of the public library. With new activity rooms, a redesigned circulation area and new self-serve equipment and more attractive facilities generally this will be a huge plus for the community. In short, 2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for new public facilities in Old Ottawa South which should help make our community a better and more attractive place in which to live. Now, if we can only fix this Lansdowne problem . . .