Owing nearly $130,000 in rent and property tax and with the downtown workers his business depends upon still mostly working from home, Komendat said his Retro-Rides shop will have to close for good at the end of October. In business on Sparks Street since 2017 — albeit in a more modest space on the same block — Komendat said his business evaporated because of the pandemic.Sign up to receive daily headline news from the Ottawa SUN, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
He filed a business plan with Public Works and Procurement Canada to move to a larger space at 79 Sparks with room for the café. He poured more than $100,000 into the space, not including the 1,200 of his own hours he put into construction. He and his daughters held off opening the café until May 2021, when PSPC said they couldn’t wait any more and had to open.
“My daughters brought the café to life. They designed the recipes. Everything is made from scratch. We really worked hard to get the place open, but there was nobody downtown.”“Winterlude was supposed to happen in February, then Omicron hits. Winterlude is cancelled. Then the city valet parks a bunch of trucks in our neighbourhood. It was awful. That was really the final nail in the coffin for downtown.
The downtown has never really recovered, he said, but compounding that has been an intransigent bureaucracy. Although his business opened in May 2021, it took 16 months for the city to deliver his first property tax bill, too late for Komendat to apply for tax relief programs that had expired. Komendat shares the space with a bike tour company, so his business owes half the $34,000 tax bill.
Komendat has met with Somerset Ward Councillor Catherine McKenney, city officials, local MPP Joel Harden, Ottawa Centre MP Yasr Naqvi and staff with PSPC. All have been sympathetic, but none have offered concrete solutions.
Just wait until the downtown turns into a ghost town or worst, a ghetto. Won't be too good for tourism. It will affect the image of all of Ottawa. But no one seems to care.
Imagine blaming the convoy “insurrectionists” for his mismanagement when every other bike shop in town can barely keep stock due to an explosion in demand for 2 wheelers. Convoy happened in the dead of winter, not exactly high season for bike cafes. Get real.