No finer places

Searching for signs of life.

Provincial grant aids unique downtown revitalization project

Prince Edward County will be the testing ground for a rural approach to economic development.

The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Farming and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) granted $102,000 to the County to run a two-year-long study as a part of the ministry’s downtown revitalization project, aimed at rural municipalities. The County is unique in its approach to the study. Instead of focusing on one area as a downtown core, the County’s study will focus on five.

The hamlets and villages that were amalgamated into the County when it became a single-tier municipality in 1998 each had their own economic core. This project hopes to recognize and preserve that. The five centres the study will focus on are Picton, Bloomfield, Wellington, Consecon and Rossmore.

The list may seem incomplete. Wendy Lane, a coordinator for the County’s Community Development department, applied for the grant. She is aware of this, but says the project can only be so large. The County identified these five areas as a first step, but will eventually apply its findings to economic development in the County as a whole.

“It’s so hard. How do you choose? How do you say, this is what’s happening? There was a time when Picton had started working on downtown revitalization. Should you only include Picton? We said, well no, we have to include as many as we can. and I think if we got any bigger—five is really quite a few to start with,” says Lane. “Part of what we talked about was how do we make this relevant to apply to other municipalities? Because the innovation that we’re doing is going to be applicable to other areas where, again, they have a number of downtown cores as opposed to just having that one commercial area.”

The project will examine how to improve the downtown areas and identify opportunities to start and expand businesses that can improve the health of these economic centres. The project is volunteer-driven, with the local business and ratepayer’s association in charge of focus groups and research for their own areas. Last spring, a committee comprising representatives from each egion was tasked with preparing the grant application, with the exception of Rossmore, which does not currently have an organization. Each of the groups provided $500 over the two years, a symbolic gesture to show their commitment.

The County will hire a coordinator within the next month or two to liaise between each association and collect data.

When the study is complete, the County will be eligible to apply for another grant that can be used to address some of the needs identified.

Although the study promises a clearer idea of how to improve the County’s commercial centres, Tina Konecny, representative from the Wellington and District Business Improvement Area, expresses frustration about the process.

“We have two years to do this study and report back. So you’re coming up with a secondary plan for the five, and you come up with recommendations and costing for all the things that we feel we would need to do. Then they apply,” says Konecny. “In order to apply for that funding to implement, you have to do all this. So we’ve got two years of putting together information in order to apply for another grant.”

Lane says the study phase is vital to get the information businesses may not already have. In Havelock, which undertook a similar study, the local grocery store learned there was a demand for later hours on Friday evenings when vacationers were coming to town. The store took advantage of the information and opened later, soon followed by other shops in the area.

Lane says such information gleaned from the study will also help with valuable information for centres in the County which haven’t been identified, such as Milford or Demorestville.

For Community Development director Neil Carbone, the value of the project is implementing the County’s strategic plan, a project of which he is at the helm.

“There wasn’t a single action that says, undergo downtown revitalization. There were things like, work with small business, doing small scale business retention and expansion initiatives to determine what some of your key businesses need to grow. There was look at way finding in the County,” says Carbone. “When we looked at the opportunity of the [downtown revitalization] grant, both from this unique regional perspective, which OMAFRA was really excited about, and seeing, geez, we could do this and tick off a lot of boxes in a lot of different areas of our [strategic] plan, it seemed like a very effective way of achieving some of our strategic action items.”