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Beaurepaire merchants fed up

Say they are being targeted unfairly by city officials

Patricia Enborg
The Gazette
Thursday, May 29, 2008

Merchants in Beaurepaire Village feel they are being unfairly targeted by Beaconsfield city hall over issues of signs and parking. They said they’re losing customers and are being penalized for things like having a sign that says “open,” in their front windows.
They took their ongoing dispute to Beaconsfield city council Monday night. One by one, they lined up at the microphone during the public question period to ask Mayor Bob Benedetti why they can’t post a sign saying their business is open or put a sandwich board outside. They also wanted to know why their customers have received so many parking tickets.
David Mitchell, who owns ETI Computer and Video in the village, said it cost him $1,200 in fines before he finally had a sign deemed acceptable for his store. He was told previous versions didn’t conform with the architecture or the rules of art.
“What kind of stupidity is this?” Mitchell said later. “What I don’t understand, there are three shopping centres in Beaconsfield. Why are we the only ones guided by this? It doesn’t make sense.”
Beaconsfield resident Christopher Porteous told council that city employees are being overly zealous in applying the bylaws.
“Seems to me we’re killing a cockroach with a sledgehammer.”
Benedetti told the packed council chamber that merchants were part of a committee that proposed the bylaws that resulted in the signs “that we have in the village today.” The committee was formed just before the $7-million revitalization of Beaurepaire Village in 2003. He said discontent over the sign bylaws led to a meeting with merchants last year to discuss modifications.
“I personally have no objection to sandwich boards ... but, unfortunately, the people who’d been delegated by the group of merchants ... didn’t want to have sandwich boards,” he said.
Bob Simatos, owner of Homestyle Bakery/Black Lion Pub, has been tangling with city hall since 2003. He asked his customers and other merchants to come to Monday night’s meeting to support him. Simatos said that during the revitalization project, his business was left out of the promised landscaping and sidewalks. He said he was also misinformed about where to connect to city services resulting in damage to everything from toilet bowls to coffee machines.
His latest problem has been with parking in front of his restaurant. Although there is a two-hour parking limit, Simatos said it has never been applied. That was until authorities started ticketing cars on his block during nights of hockey games earlier this winter. He videotaped them believing the law was being applied “discriminately” and fined for erasing the chalk marks off the tires of the cars that were ticketed.
New zoning bylaws for Beaconsfield, which include Beaurepaire’s sign bylaws, are now completed and are expected to be tabled in September followed by six to eight months of consultation.