Calgary’s downtown safety leadership table has outlined four focus areas with 28 recommendations in their report, six months after the group was struck.

The group’s co-chairs, Calgary Downtown Association Executive Director Mark Garner, and Inn from the Cold CEO Heather Morley presented the report, along with Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek, at Calgary city hall on March 6.

The report comes after consultation with more than 45 groups and 350 people representing a wide range of stakeholders, including social agencies, Indigenous Elders, building operators, post-secondaries, those with lived experiences, and law enforcement.  

It includes four strategic focus areas: Government response, strategic communication, community collaboration and specialized initiatives, broken down into more specific actions categorized into quick wins, medium term and longer term and requiring more research.

Some of those actions were discussed earlier this year when Garner and Morley talked with the media about three initial priority recommendations.

Further actions include a commitment to ‘state-of-good-repair’ that would see fire hydrants painted and curbs and sidewalks rehabilitated to improve the downtown user experience. They want to improve the accessibility of downtown washrooms and provide a daytime resource centre to provide supports to homeless Calgarians. The report also reiterated the need for a downtown police station with a service counter for reporting.

It also included a recommendation for the City to examine further security or even closure of parts of the Plus-15 network to improve safety and encourage on-street foot traffic.

The report’s longer-term actions include the establishment of a predictable fund for downtown initiatives, expansion and use of safety HELP buttons and for the downtown safety table to remain a permanent fixture. The full list is included in the report at the end of the story.

“We wanted to increase confidence in the community that targeted actions are being identified to help support the increasingly challenging and complex conditions that affect safety in the downtown core,” said Garner.

Moving from report to action

Garner said the next step for the document is with city administration where he expected they would examine the recommendations, then come up with a budget and implementation plan.

Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek said that she assumed that some of the recommendations would require council action, while others would not, she said.

“I know that administration is very eager to get to work on the things that they can do quickly because there’s an understanding that those things have to be done under the different mandates, the different service lines,” Mayor Gondek said.

The mayor did say that this strategy was similar to the city’s housing strategy in that there was no silver bullet to fixing the issue of public safety in the downtown. It was something that required multiple actions at the same time.

“I think there’s also intertwining between what we found in the housing strategy and what we’re seeing as some of the highlights in this report,” Mayor Gondek said.

Morley said that they’d heard from the social services sector that there’s a lot of work to be done on that front to help deal with public safety.

“We need to move quicker to catch up, and in order to move quicker, we need the supportive community, we need funding, and we need opportunities and doors to open, so there’s no shortage of will to start to change the system to respond differently to our current reality,” she said.

A document council can focus on

Ward 7 Coun. Terry Wong, whose ward covers much of the downtown, said that this report had identified several of the pressing issues from a variety of angles. He said Calgary must move forward on the recommendations to make the downtown a place citizens want to go.

“Downtown is a place where people want it to be clean, safe and secure and a great place to have a great experience,” he said.

“Crystallizing the safety side of the equation will make a great experience.”

Wong said that without a safer downtown, businesses won’t be able to survive and that hurts Calgary’s overall economy, and ultimately the tax base. Finding the budget to fund some of the recommendations will be a careful balance with efficiencies they’ve directed city administration to find, without bumping up their already capped property tax increase for 2025, he said.

With several recommendations involving increased advocacy to the provincial government, Mayor Gondek also said this would be a document they would be sharing with provincial officials.

“That’s how we’ve operated as a council. We’ve made sure that we are bringing the province along on the journey of how we create a safer environment and better quality of life for Calgarians,” she said.