By Pepper Parr
July 23rd, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
The City has decided on which of the three design that were created they want to go forward with.
There are some fervently opposed to the decision to spend public money on the decision to redesign Civic Square and create better entrances to City Hall.
Work will begin in September of 2025 and be completed in the late summer of 2026 – months before the municipal election. Council has a lot riding on what the Civic Square is going to look like.
There will be public art in the space; the budget is $200,000. This includes Phase 1 -Public Art Plan and Phase 2 – Artwork Fabrication and Installation. The budget includes all components related to the artwork design, engineering, fabrication and installation. Ten per cent of the budget will go to the Public Art Maintenance Reserve. The funding for the public art is from a prior Community Benefits Charge contribution.
LeuWebb has been chosen as the people who will provide the creative collaboration between advocates, artists, architects, and educators.
Christine Leu and Alan Webb work together exercising their disciplines and talents to design, curate, and produce art in the public realm that beautifies and enriches the collective human experience.
Since 2011, LeuWebb Projects has created a multitude of site-specific artworks across the globe, ranging from ephemeral, technology-driven installations to robust and permanent city fixtures. With each venture, the studio mines its artistic and architectural expertise to unearth how each site’s qualities can serve as metaphors for storytelling and critical discourse.
Two of the LeuWebb projects are show below. Both are very large taking up a lot of space; something that there isn’t very much of on the City Civic Square.
Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.
The space beneath the Gardner expressway was cleaned up and put to public use. LeuWebb did the following community space for the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.
Both are large space projects – Civic Square won’t have much public space to use.
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Just read the minutes of the last Regular meeting of Council and reviewed the video after seeing Bentivegna’s likely response to our delegation changed his mind yet again. He opposed the Civic Square he had supported at Committee of the Whole. .He did not, however, take the opportunity to explain why this further flip flop. . Is this the Burlington version of why Biden was forced out of the Presidential Elsction.
Gee whiz… If the governments in Paris, London and/or New York also decide Public Art on display in their city has become an
“unnecessary blight on their landscape to be gotten rid of” – please let me know – so I don’t waste my time travelling there to visit (again).
1. We are not Paris, London or New York with the guaranteed income from Tourism
2. We have some excellent artists and art work within our city. Let’s celebrate local whenever we can.
3. This is not the time to spend this amount of taxpayer’s money on artwork for “legacy projects” because a newbie Councillor in 2019 decided he did not like the artwork selected by an approved process.
The Mayor and Council are really ‘rolling the dice’ on this one. The “reimagining” of Civic Square is scheduled for completion somewhere in the middle of the 2026 Municipal Elections. Should the outcome be impressive, then likely people will forgive and forget the unnecessary expense. However, if the result does not capture the public’s imagination, then the reverse may be true and the electorate will go to the polls with visions of profligate spending and unprecedented tax increases. A very interesting scenario.
$200,000 for art? Let’s call it for what it is, too much. How many food hampers could be purchased with the same dollars. How many people whose lives were turned upside down by the flood could he helped with this money? I enjoy art but timing is everything and it is high time we shelved such initiatives. Is it any wonder our taxes keep going up. The taxing and spending mentality at all levels of government needs to be reeled in now.
1,079 homeowners impacted by the flood last week, and the City is spending $200K on art in a downtown civic square that is seldom used….except perhaps by a few municipal employees on a lunch break.
Misguided priorities or what!
One of the reasons we do not have a safe and accessible legislation compliant Civic Square completed in 2019 as agreed with budgeted cost $1m approx as opposed to $7.6m , was the art work policy was objected to by newbie Councillor Rory Nissan. That saw an affordable and available increase in awarded contract price request removed from the consent agenda. It started hours of Council time devoted to how to change what this majority of newbie councillors and a newbie Mayor claimed was an underwhelming design and in the process contravene legislation without being held accountable.
CAO Tim Commisso set the tone for will of council beating out legislated requirements of city structures and services and REPUTEDLY democratically elected 2014-2018 Council decisions including budget; (city files vehemently dispute the “democratically” as Blake Hurley and his predecessor aware of).
Now we are learning through the Gazette that LeuWebb is the will of Council rather than local talent, obviously at a much higher cost.
Yes we all know they tried to remove the name of our world class artist Robert Bateman from the public building names, now this We do not dare to think of what next.
The good news is word is spreading that its time our government acted to give taxpayers the Municipal governance they have a right to expect and indeed have been promised through a 1988 Cabinet Directive.
Report from a good friend visiting her mom in her LTC home. The reputation of Her Worship for not doing what she promised re flood mitigation was the singular topic of conversation overheard from family visits. Word of mouth from those who don’t have time to put their thoughts on paper is very, very valuable iin terms of best interests of our city right now,
Kudos – continue to do what you do best in the media bringing us the facts.