Better options for RCMP lot

After community engagement the City of Kelowna produced the 2020-2025 Cultural Plan, a 101 page document with beautiful graphics. Our current Council endorsed this Plan September 16, 2019.

Here is a quote from page 40:  Goal 4: Commit to Developing New Facilities:

"Many of Kelowna’s facilities are aging and have structural deficits that limit the ability to mount sophisticated productions and negatively impact the audience experience. The Cultural Facilities Master Plan, expected to be released in late 2019, will provide direction and inform ongoing investments, decisions, priorities and actions. This report will be a starting point for demonstrating the need for more facilities."

A year later, the "Cultural Facilities Master Plan" referred to in the endorsed "Cultural Plan" has still not been completed so we must question our elected Officials: how can they vote to give up the RCMP/Doyle Ave property in the centre of our Cultural District to a developer for a high rise condominium building BEFORE the Cultural Facilities Master Plan has been completed? Why the rush?

The Doyle property is the only available land of any substantial size the City owns in the Cultural District.  It is beside the Kelowna Community Theatre and the obvious place for a first phase of a Performing Arts Centre, later to include the replaced Community Theatre.

It can take 3 years to build a theatre so it is critical that a new theatre be built before demolishing and replacing the old one otherwise we, visitors and performing artists will be without a suitable venue for far too long. It makes financial and logistical sense to build them adjoining so administration, meeting rooms, rehearsal studios etc. can be shared.

How can our Council not see the RCMP/Doyle property is the answer for a new arts facility building?  How can they decide that a 13 storey condominium for just a few residents will serve the community better than a new Performing Arts Centre that would serve the Central Okanagan, population 200,000?

Our Community Theatre was built in 1962, Kelowna's population was 15,000. Our population is now 125,000.

By not evaluating the ultimate potential of the RCMP/Doyle property with a view to the arts, it reaffirms we currently have a development prone Mayor backed with a Council that votes in agreement, thus showing they have a limited vision for the future landscape of our downtown Cultural District. Their current plan to use funds from this land deal to extend the Art Walk from the Library Parkade to the Queensway bus terminal and install a 6,000 sq ft hub for artists, to the sacrifice of a future multi-stage Performing Arts Centre does not extol great vision for the Cultural District.

There are options where a 13 storey condominium can be built; not  so for a Performing Arts Centre complex.  To  fund the project we have a head start if the City owns the land.

Is it too late for our elected officials to make the right decision for the use of the old RCMP property?

Laura Doncom, Kelowna