Oh...good Lord...what a bunch of utter...

...hoo-hah.

Or, in the more prosaic words of the immortal Bard, 'Much ado about nothing', or '...it is a tale

told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'

Oi-friggin'-vey.

This week's Stoney Creek News has a front-page headline: 'Downtown parking meters up and running'...and it goes rapidly downhill from there.

In fact, the article's opening sentence is wrong: 'Free parking has expired in downtown Stoney Creek'. Actually, free street parking has 'expired'. There's still free parking in Municipal Lot #3.

But that error aside, the stance taken by all those concerned -including the Stoney Creek News, who has previously decided to put a particularly negative spin on things, as noted in this entry back in May- is not only disheartening, it's defiantly whiney.

Look; I've spent an inordinate amount of time on this very blog examining the wherefores of Downtown Stoney Creek's reaction to paid parking, one that I came to conclude stems from a head-in-the-sand mentality that has no real desire to address the reasons for its susceptibility. In fact, the paid parking issue was one of the two local concerns that drove me to start this blog. The time I refer to includes composing a ten-part series on what comprises the notion of a 'downtown', the history of Stoney Creek's, an actual attempt to re-think and re-invent it, a further three-part examination of the 'downtown parking dilemma', a fable-esque cautionary tale connected to all this...as well as the beginnings of a long-form creative piece based on the idea that someone wins a ginormous lottery and buys the whole downtown, just to do a 'makeover' and solve all the problems that everyone is ignoring. (All one has to do to read this material is to simply go through the archives here, focusing on the May entries.)

For those too lazy to check out what I've yammered on about, here's what it comes down to: there is insufficient vibrancy or vitality in Downtown Stoney Creek, rendering it vulnerable to -the perceived- catastrophe that is 'paid parking'.

Vibrant and vital 'downtowns' (be they a strip, a core, or some larger geographical aspect) have primary retail draws. These draws infuse the area with desirability and energy. People then have sufficient need -and desire- to shop there that a $1/hr parking charge couldn't possibly be an issue, just wouldn't be a negative influence on their shopping habits.

How many primary retail draws does Downtown Stoney Creek have? None. (I'd suggest the Village Restaurant, but that's not technically 'retail'. Close, but no cigar.)

In the News article, Connie Behie, the Executive Director of the downtown Stoney Creek BIA references how the community supported the area merchants, helping them 'survive the opening of Eastgate Square.'

Huh?

Eastgate Square...that just celebrated its 37th anniversary, opening way back in 1973? Well, I've dealt with all this before, it's all there in that ten-part series, the 'explanation' as to why Downtown Stoney Creek didn't disappear when Eastgate opened, why it didn't disappear the year before when Jackson Square opened...and it's not because the entity known as 'Downtown Stoney Creek' had vibrancy and vitality, even back then.

As I pointed out on at least one occasion right here on this blog, you know there's something not-quite-right with a situation involving the so-called 'survival' of a downtown when the three primary examples repeatedly cited by Stoney Creek News articles are 1) a social entity (the Royal Canadian Legion), 2) a seniors' organization (Seniors' Outreach Services) and 3) a food bank (Stoney Creek Community Food Bank). Oh, there was carping from business owners (one such is featured in this week's article, saying 'seeing the installed meters was like a slap in the face'), but the ironic thing was that there weren't sufficient business concerns to really have all that much happen as a result of the proposed metered parking. (Which at the time, was going to include all parking in the downtown, including the 143 spaces of Lot #3.)

Even now, the merchant mentioned in the article, Mr. Thoma, seems to mostly bemoan the fact that he's going to have to pay for parking for himself and his employees; when I began looking into the downtown parking brouhaha, it was suggested to me that aside from the aforementioned Big Three Organizations whom paid parking would most effect, the next biggest concern was the downtown employees who by necessity had to move their cars around throughout the day, even when the spaces were free.

In one of my pieces, I questioned whether those with the most to lose (and gain) from a variance in business in the downtown have a working knowledge of their customers' habits. The amount spent per visit. How many visits per week.

Moreover, the natural catchment area for the downtown, what I refer to as 'authentic' Stoney Creek (Centennial to Gray, Hwy#8 to the Escarpment) has not to my knowledge been surveyed in regards to its shopping habits. Specifically, what do the residents go downtown for, how much do they spend, and if they don't shop downtown -keeping in mind of course that there's no primary retail draw to compel them to- then where are they shopping?

(I've suggested this be done to those-in-the-know. I actually offered to contract it myself. But the cost was excessive. And this was true; after all, who's going to pay to find out that they're not able to provide potential customers with what they want to spend good money on?)

Connected tangentially to this is the question 'Who actually uses Lot #3?'

Seriously. Has anyone actually done a scientific survey? My guess is that by an overwhelming margin, 'clients' from the Health Sciences Building on Mountain Avenue 'monopolize' it. (Again, determining these numbers would be a straightforward affair: pay corps of students to monitor the lot for a week, maybe two, noting who goes where. Absolutely, without-fail accurate? Nope. But at least we wouldn't be guessing.) So, once again: the 'parking situation' isn't one about what downtown concerns should be about, namely retail, it seems to be about facilitating a building that by rights, should have incorporated its own needs into its designs. But then, that was more than four decades ago, and who had the forethought to considering stuff like underground parking...?

Back in June, in a response to this article in the Stoney Creek News, I wrote a Letter to The Editor which I published here. In it, I made the point that prettying up the place doesn't make a downtown a place worth visiting, a place where you want to spend your money. Further to this I asked:

"Putting all of that aside, I'm curious: in three years' time, when we're hosting the bicentennial of The Battle of Stoney Creek, and nothing substantive has changed in Downtown Stoney Creek, we hopefully have all of our properties filled and our hanging baskets are well-watered and the enhoused plants are summarily dead-headed, our benches are in working order and all of our signage is looking downright spiffy...

...just what is it that we're all hoping that our thousands of visitors will be spending money on to put revenue into the local economy, other that their admission fees to the re-enactment, their souvenirs...and perhaps an ice cream or two purchased at the Dairy?"

The Stoney Creek News article ends thusly:

'Although she is cautiously optimistic, Behie acknowledges that the next few months will be very telling for downtown Stoney Creek. "We'll definitely in wait-and-see mode."

Why? Why would losing free street parking have such a calamitous impact on the downtown, unless...

...unless the downtown is so utterly, undeniably vulnerable.

And if a buck-an-hour charge can have that kind of effect, then surely to God bitching about about paid parking isn't where available energy should be going: Downtown Stoney Creek deserves to be reinvented, not just the inspiration for yet another round of incessant whining.