City demolishes derelict Fredericton business sitting on prime real estate
CBC
A former gas station that was once a Fredericton fixture was demolished Monday morning.
Most recently known as Craig's Automotive Service, the building across from the Delta Hotel on Woodstock Road operated as a gas station for about 50 years — from the 1940s to the 1990s — but subsequently became derelict.
An excavator started smashing the walls shortly before 7 a.m., and within about an hour all that remained was a pile of cinder blocks, steel and wood beams, plywood and metal sheets.
"It's a good day," said Jason LeJeune, a city councillor and chair of the city's economic vitality committee, who used to live a few doors down the street.
The property is along the western "gateway" into the city, said LeJeune.
It's been "underutilized," and many people complained about what went on there and the way it looked, he said.
Graffiti had been spray painted on the exterior walls.
There were reports of people entering the building and sleeping rough inside, said LeJeune, but to his knowledge that had not happened since the city took possession last summer.
The doors and windows had been boarded up and the city's building services staff patrolled it regularly, he said.
As CBC previously reported, the former owner owed back taxes, and partly due to possible contamination of the soil, "there was no clear business case for a successful private sector investment," said a news release from the city.
Higher demand and prices for land probably played a role in a deal finally being worked out, said LeJeune.
But it still required a "real creative" solution, he said.
The city real estate manager worked with the property owner and the provincial finance department to come up with a "win-win-win" scenario that allowed the city to take possession for $1 and start the work, he said.
It could be a model for dealing with other brownfields in the city and elsewhere in the province, said LeJeune.
While his party has made a cause célèbre out of its battle with the Speaker, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has periodically waxed poetic about the House of Commons — suggesting that its green upholstery is meant to symbolize the fields of the English countryside where commoners met centuries ago before the signing of the Magna Carta.