Following a request from Stratford Perth Pride, Stratford council will consider having the city take on ownership and ongoing maintenance of the recently restored rainbow crosswalk in the city’s downtown.
At Mondays meeting, Stratford Perth Pride president AJ Adams presented the group’s request to council just weeks after the crosswalk had been restored. Originally installed across Wellington Street in front of city hall in October 2021 after a fundraising campaign by the local Pride group and Sirkel Foods co-owner Kelly Ballantyne, the crosswalk was vandalized with black paint within 12 hours. Over the following year, ice, snowplows and other issues led to the crosswalk falling into even more disrepair.
This year, Stratford Perth Pride and Ballantyne once again teamed up to raise $7,000 to restore the crosswalk and better protect it from seasonal changes, traffic, vandalism and other damage. The new crosswalk features the traditional Pride rainbow colours, as well as pink and light blue to represent the transgender community, and black and brown for queer people of colour.
“Stratford Perth Pride is a humble but mighty team of volunteers. We are a non-profit. We are not road-maintenance people. … When it comes to maintaining this crosswalk, we’re more than happy to fundraise, but we are not experts. What we’re hearing from the community is that they don’t want to see this crosswalk go into disrepair like they saw with the first one. So what we’re asking council tonight is for the City of Stratford to take on ownership and regular maintenance of the crosswalk,” Adams said.
“Public works does regular maintenance of crosswalks across the city on a regular basis anyway. It’s just an extra color (scheme) that the city would have to take on.”
The paint, Adams continued, would cost the city a couple of thousand dollars to purchase but would allow public works staff to maintain the crosswalk for the next few years. Adams said Stratford Perth Pride has a couple of thousand dollars left over from its most recent fundraising campaign and would be happy to use it to help the city pay for that paint if necessary.
When asked by Coun. Mark Hunter if maintaining the rainbow crosswalk would be any different than maintaining regular crosswalks, infrastructure director Taylor Crinklaw said the work should be “fairly straightforward.”
Council voted unanimously to refer crosswalk ownership and maintenance to the city’s 2024 budget deliberations. Stratford Mayor Martin Ritsma also thanked Stratford Perth Pride and Ballantyne for working with the city’s public works department earlier this year to restore the crosswalk.