Calgary city council will be presented with 14 recommendations on Tuesday as city administration champions a better approach to preserving historic buildings.
“The City, as a whole, has done a good job with city-owned buildings in terms of the heritage strategy that they put together with historic city hall,” said Josh Traptow, executive director of the Calgary Heritage Authority, “But when it comes to private buildings, private property owners, they’re really has been a lack of tools and incentives to incentivize those homeowners outside of the grant programs that are available.”
“Until this year, that grant program was only $220,000 for the entire city. It’s now $500,000 but Edmonton’s is $2.3 million. We’re still far behind even Edmonton.”
According to Traptow, the recommendations will include:
- Changes to the Historic Resources Act
- An increase to grant programs
- A Heritage District overlay program
- Tax abatements and rebates
““We need to preserve what heritage we do have that’s left. There’s over 800 buildings that are identified on the inventory but less than 100 of them are legally protected. So the vast majority of them could be demolished, altered at any time.”
Ward 8 councillor Evan Woolley says the City has conducted engineering modelling to determine what needs to be done to bring the 12 or 14 City owned heritage buildings up to par but admits that more could be done to encourage private property owners to follow suit.
“One of the challenges we’ve had historically is we do not have tools for private owners to incentivize them to protect their properties,” said Woolley. “So what’s happened is whenever one of them comes up, whenever one of them is about to be demolished, then we have to spend taxpayer money to save them. That’s not financially responsible, it’s not fair, it’s not smart, it ends up costing more in the backend.”
“There’s a number of tools in other cities, a tax abatement tool, to incentivize them to protect their houses and invest in them without the public taxpayer having to do that.”
Traptow says the general public has recently come to embrace the importance of Calgary’s historic sites and the recent loss of the 115-year-old Enoch Sales House to a devastating fire served as an example.
“In the last decade, I think we’ve seen a total shift in terms of Calgarians and how they view heritage, how they think it should be saved,” said Traptow. “I think Enoch Sales was the straw that broke the camel’s back. People had been driving by it for two decades and everyone always asked ‘What’s that yellow building on Macleod Trail?’ and then it burned down.”
“Why? Why did it burn down? Why was it not saved? What can we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again? I think Calgarians are finally speaking up and saying that they want to see their heritage preserved.”
Mayor Nenshi agrees that the loss of the heritage building to fire was an eye-opener.
“I do think that coming out of what happened at the Enoch Sales House, it was really important for us to look at whether our current closing mechanisms are strong enough. I don’t think they are.”
With files from CTV's Jordan Kanygin
