From Experience Regina to revitalization: Regina’s mayor looks back and ahead

The first days of the year are often a time for looking back at what 2023 brought, and looking ahead to the coming 12 months.

For Regina Mayor Sandra Masters, 2023 held a long list of highlights. She gave them in a running stream, including housing initiatives, upgrades on Dewdney Avenue, a series of successful trade shows and events, infrastructure upgrades and a large number of provincial and national sporting events.

She said finding land for new school sites has been important.

“Harbour Landing is a big deal because we’ve been behind the eight-ball and out of land there and so making that one happen is a pretty big deal,” said Masters.

She also talked about opening the new Wascana Pool. Some of her family managed to stop by the new facility in the summer.

“I loved it because my son-in-law, they’re from Saskatoon (and they) said, ‘Saskatoon doesn’t have anything like this.’ I said ‘I know,’” said Masters with a grin.

“Giving something to the city that they can be proud of in that beautiful park space that we have, that feels good. That’s what city building is about.”

Lots got done in 2023, but Masters said it never feels like it’s enough.

“It’s never enough,” she said. “There’s never enough time, there’s never enough money and we’ve got lots more work to do.”

With highlights there are often lowlights and 2023 had its share of those as well for Masters, including the Experience Regina debacle.

“A rebrand gone completely wrong,” Masters said.

The new tourism campaign was introduced to a lot of fanfare in the spring but things quickly went downhill after critics began to raise concerns over slogans they said were misogynistic.

Masters said the lesson learned in that situation was that branding is extremely important to the people of Regina, and there’s work to do to rebuild the city’s brand.

“The whole point is come out on the other side with lessons learned and with a pathway forward that you can build something better,” she said.

There was also the homeless encampment that grew on the lawn of City Hall in the summer. Masters called it a particularly negative issue for the city.

The camp was eventually removed by police after it was deemed a fire risk. Masters and the city were roundly criticized for their handling of it.

Asked about it now, Masters said looking back, it depends who you ask whether it was handled properly.

“We had multiple community-based organizations doing outreach, we had social services out every day and (residents) didn’t want to be spoken to,” Masters said. “And so I’m not sure of another way that it would have worked out if you can’t get folks to go back to where they’re living, or go back to the shelter, or to connect to services.”

2024

Masters has a lot of hopes for the coming year, many of them around planning for the building of the city.

“I like to joke around that one of the lessons is that just everything takes so long, like we want to study things for one and two years, and we’re not business and so we can’t necessarily operate at the speed of business, but we should be able to operate quicker,” said Masters.

There are multi-year capital projects she said she wants to keep moving like the Dewdney Avenue revitalization. She explained that, until there are particular services installed on Dewdney, the Yards won’t be able to be built.

“This is work that should have been happening eight years ago, 10 years ago. We bought it, we did nothing, we didn’t want to deal with it because it’s expensive. At the end of the day it’s however many millions of dollars but if it doesn’t happen then you can’t actually build out the yards,” she explained.

There will be a municipal election in Regina next fall and Masters isn’t answering whether she’ll be running again.

“I was elected for four years and I think I should proceed to govern for four years. Nobody else has to announce until a few weeks out, so I’m not sure why I have to,” she said with a laugh.

“What I don’t want to do is put a pause in making decisions and putting a pause in, frankly, making tough decisions because it wouldn’t be politically expedient to do so.”

There are some things she said she wants to see to completion, but others she admits are ongoing – like building for the next phase of the city and investing in the future.