Gerbasi wants crackdown on illegal West Broadway surface parking

Coun. Jenny Gerbasi says illegal surface-parking lots are a blight on the inner-city West Broadway neighbourhood and wants bylaw-enforcement officers to crack down on the owners.

The Fort Rouge-East Fort Garry councillor has authored a motion directing city staff to conduct an inventory of West Broadway surface-parking lots that are operating without permission from the city and come up with a strategy to bring the properties into compliance.

"These lots are owned and operated. Somebody's making a few dollars off them, paying low taxes on the land and there's no sign of anything ever changing. My concern is a number of these, I suspect, are not zoned as parking lots," Gerbasi said Sunday in an interview.

"It's having a detrimental effect on development in the neighbourhood, on the quality of the neighbourhood. There are ugly surface parking lots all over the place in there that [are] not legal. To me, that's an issue."

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West Broadway sits at the northern edge of Gerbasi's ward, immediately west of downtown. The councillor said while she could not identify any specific lots in the neighbourhood that are operating illegally, city staff told her the area north of Great-West Life's downtown campus is a trouble spot.​

Greg MacPherson, executive director of the West Broadway Community Organization, said surface parking in general is too prevalent on Good Street, which runs between Broadway and Portage Avenue.

"Good Street's development has been really, really slow. We're hoping to see it match the rest of the neighbourhood. It's [been one] long row of surface parking," MacPherson said.

Gerbasi's motion comes before council's City Centre community committee on Tuesday.

New lot in Lord Roberts

At the same committee, the city is asking for permission to create a new surface-parking lot in a different part of Gerbasi's ward, the Lord Roberts neighbourhood. 

Winnipeg Transit wants to pave 123 parking stalls on the south side of Brandon Avenue, west of Nassau Street South, in order to replace a surface-parking lot that will be lost when its main garage is expanded. An existing rooming house must be demolished and a commuter-cycling path must be moved to make room for the new surface lot.