First Parliament working group holds first meet 6 times this year

Eric Morse –

Councillor Pam McConnell has assembled a community working group to consult on the First Parliament site on the Southwest corner of Front and Parliament streets.

Mandated to provide a forum for the community and city staff to consider planning, design, and programming opportunities for the future development of the First Parliament Site, the group embraces a very wide range of agencies and groups.

On the agency side, membership includes city parks, heritage preservation, real estate services, parking, and urban design officials, plus representation from Heritage Toronto and the Toronto Public Library, the Ontario Heritage Trust and Waterfront Toronto.

Citizen stakeholder groups include Citizens for Old Toronto (Rollo Myers), the Corktown Business and Residents’ Association (Kara Isert and Sandra Iskandar), the Gooderham & Worts Neighbourhood Aassociation (Lester Brown), the St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood Business Improvement Area or BIA (George Milbrand), the St. Lawrence NA (David Crawford), the Southeast Downtown NA (Edward Nixon) and West Don Lands Committee (Julie Beddoes). The group held its first meeting on July 11 and will meet up to six times per year.

McConnell’s office noted that the library will be a major player in the planning consultations, since its capital plan already foresees investments of $16 million in 2016 and 2017 as a starting point to relocate the library’s current processing facility to Ellesmere Rd. in Scarborough and build a St. Lawrence regional library on the First Parliament site by 2019. One of the major tasks of the group will be to help fully integrate library planning with other planned uses for the site.

“A lot of this have been following this for years, so the first meeting provided a welcome catch-up,” said Gooderham and Worts rep. Lester Brown. “The library’s planning is a relatively new development. During part of the meeting we discussed who should be involved, and I think that although Heritage Ontario is already at the table, there should be involvement from the provincial government.”