Building could cost Holyrood more than expected

By Craig Westcott/March 24, 2023

Holyrood council might have gotten more than it bargained for when it bought the former Port o’ Call Building three years ago to give the Heritage Society a place to call home.

It turns out the $465,000 purchase has come with an extra price tag for repairs and renovations that were not expected at the time.

Infrastructure and public works committee chairperson Steve Winsor, who like most of his colleagues was not on council when the decision was made to buy the building, outlined the problems at the March 7 public council meeting. He explained the state of the building came to light after the Heritage Society recently approached the Town to express concerns.

“That’s how our committee came to be involved,” said Winsor. “It’s a town-owned building.”

Winsor said in response the committee asked a senior staff person to pull the file “to see what we knew about the building.”

According to the file, the Public Works Department and Fire Department inspected the building prior to the purchase and discovered a number of issues, which were brought forward in the negotiations to buy the Port o’ Call.

“I guess the decision to purchase is outside the purview of this committee, but I want to provide the information that we did have those inspections done,” Winsor said. “But I will note they were not completed by a third party licensed and certified building inspector, which is what we are recommending now. To move forward, we need to truly understand exactly what is wrong, or not wrong, what needs to be remediated with the building, and to do that we need to get it properly inspected by a third party, no differently than any of us would do when buying a home.”

Based on the findings of the inspection, Winsor said, he expects the committee will recommend hiring a licensed and certified multi-trades contractor to provide a “robust estimate” of what it will cost to bring the building up to standard.

“That is the way that it should go,” Winsor said. “I know in the past we have attempted to do some remediation ourselves and improvements with the public works (department), and a lot of that has been done as filler work. The director has other priorities and work orders for those individuals (on staff) and in some cases the work may require certified trades, which our staff may not necessarily have.”

Winsor then cited an idea proposed some time ago by councillor Bruce King. The retired soldier had suggested the Town apply to take advantage of a Canadian Forces program that assigns groups of soldiers with trades to work on public service projects at no cost to the recipients. However, Holyrood’s unionized municipal workforce vetoed the idea.

“That’s something that we need to talk about again as a council,” Winsor said. “But again, I’m trying to focus on the technical part of things which is what is wrong, what we need to fix, how do we fix it and how much is it going to cost? I’d like to go on the public record as saying I never did support the purchase of that building without following the due diligence and process… I want to state that… We’re in a challenging fiscal environment, we have a challenging budget, we raised taxes on residents and (so) how much are we willing to spend to bring that building to where it should be. Or do we move in a different direction? That’s something we’re going to have to talk about.”

Once the inspection is completed and a detailed cost estimate provided, Winsor added, the Town should establish an affordable operations plan for the building.

“That’s not in place at the moment,” said the councillor. “It needs to be. Is it a seasonal operation, or not? How do we govern revenue generation and spending around that? I don’t know.”

Mayor Gary Goobie said there is some money available in the Town’s coffers that can be applied to the repairs.

“My thought on that is, do you start spending some money before you have the complete picture?” Winsor replied.

“No,” Goobie agreed. 

Councillor King said he thinks the museum should be a seasonal operation as he sees no value in keeping the building open all year.

“There has to be a cut off point,” added King, referring to the amount of money the Town can spend on the building’s repair. “It’s like the old country and western song – It’s too late to turn back now. But we have to have some kind of figure in mind that when all these things come in –the roof and the windows and God knows what else (as) the upstairs still hasn’t been completed – we need to have some kind of figure in mind where we’re going to say, and I don’t know how we’re going to do that, when is enough, enough? But what are we going to do with it then? We’ve got a building down there that needs repairs so it’s probably not going to be on the high point to sell considering that when it was on the market it was on the market for over two years, or pretty close to two years before we bought it. So, it’s not a prime commodity down there for people to want to buy it. I guess my question to everybody is when do we say enough is enough?”

In the meantime, Holyrood has applied for an “Age Friendly Building Grant’ from the government to make upgrades to the Heritage Building. If successful, the Town is expected to use the money to make the building more accessible to people with disabilities. But that will be separate from most of the other repairs.

“As we just spoke about, we know that there’s going to be many upgrades required for that building,” said Deputy Mayor Michelle Woodford. “Hopefully we’ll get that grant.”