Here's where incentives to business actually work

When city council added the Facade Improvement Grant Program to its Downtown Community Improvement Plan (CIP) last year, the reviews were mostly positive.

There were, in fact, only two votes against the series of changes to the CIP.

Councillor Mike Kalivas returned to his philosophical objections to giving downtown businesses money to upgrade their facades, arguing that facade improvements are among those costs of doing business that owners should take on themselves.

Jeff Earle, meanwhile, said the CIP add-ons were “myopic,” focusing on the downtown core to the exclusion of the city's struggling malls.

Still, it's hard not to see the project to renovate the former Old Cornerstone Ice Cream Parlour as a slam-dunk for the Facade Improvement Grant Program, and a shining example of how it can work.

The facade improvement program offers half the total cost of façade improvements to commercial properties in the main core, up to $10,000 per property, where a project is worth more than $1,000.

Given the sad state of the onetime Nehemiah Seaman House, the facade grant (still in the application stage at this point) would come in quite handy.

And if it makes even an iota of difference between the renovation going forward versus the flooded-out building remaining a shuttered derelict for another decade, it will have been worth our tax dollars.

Yes, one should always be suspicious when taxpayer money is used to benefit a business venture.

First, there's the risk our money is going to someone who doesn't, strictly speaking, need it. And second, there's the risk we are subsidizing one competitor over another, thereby rigging the free market.

But one of the philosophical foundations of public spending remains the achievement of civic good. Funding a private businessperson to improve a property no businessperson would otherwise touch, and by so doing removing an eyesore from our main core, is indeed a civic good.

This is one project city hall might do well to fast-track.