An artist’s illustration shows the potential for a street plaza on half a block of 85th Street next to BMO. (Calum Srigley for MVH Urban Planning and Design Inc.)
A new plan for revitalzing the Osoyoos town centre was unveiled last week when the report by MVH Urban Planning and Design Inc. was presented to Osoyoos town council.
The plan is packed with illustrations done by Calum Srigley illustrating ideas for transforming the town centre into a welcoming and pedestrian-friendly place where people will want to spend time.
These ideas came out of workshops in June and September during which local stakeholders discussed and selected different “Action Plan Items,” narrowing them down to a list of 10.
The plan is not a blueprint representing changes that will be done. Rather, it is more a menu of ideas that council and business groups can choose to act on over the next 20 years.
Some of these ideas may be deemed impractical. And new ideas may come forth. But the plan provides some guiding principles that will hopefully be taken into account as our downtown evolves.
These include encouraging infill residential development on the edges of Main Street to encourage people to live downtown.
And there are suggestions that business people should organize in some way to help guide this development, whether through a formal Business Improvement Area (BIA) that can levy for improvements or a less-formal advisory body.
Like the recently installed “bump-outs” or “bulges,” there will be some specific improvements that different people may love or hate. But hopefully Osoyoos residents and business owners can agree on the general principle of making the downtown more people friendly.
Some of the ideas are low-hanging fruit that council may choose to move forward with in the shorter term.
Others will require more costly investments that hopefully can be funded through the Resort Municipality Initiative.
The consultant’s work is done with the release of this report. It’s now up to town council, the business community and the community at large to turn the vision into reality.
