A Powell River business owner wants the City of Powell River to do a better job consulting before disrupting retail traffic.
Sam Sansalone, owner of Powell River Outdoors, said recent work on a storm sewer line in front of his parking lot on Willingdon Avenue kept customers away. “Basically, there are certain windows for small businesses in Powell River—summertime, Christmas,” he said. “Christmas is critical. For my business, it’s the number one money maker to survive the long winter.”
Sansalone went away on holiday in December, he said. “I came back to full out construction in my back parking lot. For how long? For over a week.”
He had no idea the construction was happening, he said, but he was checking sales revenues online. He couldn’t understand why sales were down 50 per cent over last year. “Of course, there was no parking. No parking means zero business,” he said.
While he understands the city has to do its work, it should have notified him, Sansalone said, and he would have ensured that the work didn’t happen leading up to Christmas. “That is my bread and butter. If I can’t make it in the next two weeks, I might as well just pack it in.”
Tor Birtig, the city’s director of infrastructure services, said in the future, businesses will be informed about upcoming work. “The job initially was just a small storm job,” he said. “It just happened to be in one lane of a narrow road.”
There have been flooding issues that affected residents on the lower side of the road, Birtig said, and the work was an improvement to the storm water system to redirect some of the flows.
Sansalone called Mayor Dave Formosa to complain about what happened and Formosa said he understood Sansalone’s concerns. “I thanked him for the phone call,” he said. “I said you should have had somebody come to tell you what was going on and discuss it with you. We’ll make sure that that happens in the future.”
