For Business Owners
Downtown storefront vacancy sits near 11%, and 48% of downtown businesses would consider leaving if their lease expired. You carry the costs of disorder, the delays of a slow City Hall, and a tax bill set without anyone owning a number for your success. This framework changes the operating environment: order on the street, speed at the counter, customers back downtown, and one office accountable for one published number. Every measure is costed and reported quarterly.
This is the same framework as the full Program — same measures, same numbers, same jurisdictional caveats — read through an operator's eyes. Every measure named here is costed and sourced in the master, and every number links back to it.
← Back to the frameworkA City Hall that values your time
- Business licences in 5 business days, maximum (Measure 72). Not 5 weeks. Plus tenant-improvement permits on a published 6-week target, a designated downtown economic coordinator with authority to escalate stalled files, and in-person welcome and thank-you visits to businesses — a 2022 commitment by others, never delivered.
- Permit times published, by category (Measure 7). Simple under 6 weeks, complex under 6 months, rezoning under 9 months — your answer in writing, with a date attached. Scorecard row 8.
- A simplification charter (Measure 72b). Every new rule earns its place; every old rule gets reviewed.
Order on the street you pay rent on
- A Downtown Public Order Team (Measure 26) with bylaw enforcement extended to 6 AM – 10 PM, 7 days a week (Measure 27). Disorder does not keep office hours; enforcement will not either.
- Graffiti gone in 48 hours — 90% of it (Measure 14), extended sanitation hours (Measure 17), and enforcement targeted by data at the small number of addresses driving most calls (Measure 28).
- A business-security cost-spreading pilot (Measure 28b). Exposure-based, not blanket: capped reimbursement for security, glazing, and sharps costs in FOI-validated high-exposure zones, funded from savings, with a 24-month sunset.
- A voluntary business camera registry, VicPD-led (Measure 28c) — and no City surveillance cameras. Streets lit all night (Measure 37), with storefront lighting encouraged: lit streets are safer streets and busier tills.
Customers back downtown
- First-hour free parking (Measures 75 and 24). The single largest discretionary cost in this framework, stated plainly — because foot traffic is your revenue. Plus real-time parking availability published to navigation apps, using sensors, not street cameras.
- Storefront vacancy from 11% to 5% (Measure 71). Quarterly vacancy reporting by block, streamlined tenant-improvement permits, pop-up facilitation, targeted attraction — and advocacy to the Province for the authority to surcharge persistent vacancies.
- Team Victoria — one office, one number, one flagship event (Measure 73b). A small attractiveness office chaired by the mayor, whose published mandate is the vacancy number, with a shoulder-season target for November through March — the months when downtown businesses fail. The Conference Centre gets its own published target and its own published net cost (Measure 73c), and tourism marketing continues with better wayfinding and extended-hours coordination (Measure 73).
A tax bill set in the open
In 2026, council raised residential rates 9.34% and business rates 4.78%. This framework caps the residential glide path and makes any change to the business-to-residential ratio a separate, stand-alone vote with a published dollar effect on a median business — no more ratio shifts delivered as a side effect of a headline number (Measure 66). The savings engine behind it is real: zero-based budgeting of all 200+ programs (Measure 65) and competitive testing of major service contracts (Measure 15), with every verified dollar published (scorecard row 2).
Also in the framework for you
- Growth sectors with a plan (Measures 73d, 55, and 55b). A published Strategic Economic Plan, city procurement that favours local technology firms, and the ocean economy treated as Victoria's natural vertical — sectors named, employment counted, so “economic development” stops meaning only downtown retail.
- An evening and winter economy (Measures 51, 50, and 45b). Year-round outdoor activation, extended hours for civic cultural spaces, and pedestrianization piloted where it is earned — Bastion Square first, measured before it expands, with operators at the table.
- Clean in the unglamorous ways (Measures 16, 34, and 36). A real pest-management plan, a rapid-removal protocol downtown, and priority public spaces reclaimed block by block.
- Traffic that moves (Measure 19). Adaptive signals cut travel times about 25% in Pittsburgh — your deliveries, your staff, and your customers all arrive sooner.
Your Victoria in 2030
It is a February evening in 2030 — the month downtown used to die. Your street is lit all night, and your storefront has neighbours: vacancy sits near 5%, and the flagship winter event has the hotels full in what used to be the empty season. Your licence renewal took two days. The tenant-improvement permit for the expansion came with a published date, and the date held. The one night you needed a bylaw officer, someone answered at 9 PM; the graffiti was gone before Monday; and Team Victoria called you before you ever called them, because somebody's job is your block's number. Your tax notice moved by a figure you had already budgeted, because nobody can shift the ratio onto you quietly anymore. You are not the last business on the street. You are the one that stayed — and two that left are asking about coming back.
How you hold us to it
Quarterly public scorecard: downtown vacancy at 5% (row 9), permit speed by category (row 8), graffiti removal in 48 hours (row 7), crime severity down 15% (row 6), verified savings banked (row 2). One number per promise. No spin.