KAMLOOPS — Any time you drive downtown along Seymour Street you’ll pass a big, empty, very sad brick building on the corner of Fourth Avenue.
It has a habit of sitting empty between engagements.
Once, it was a department store, then it was the city’s daily newspaper, and then there were high hopes it would become a performing arts centre.
The Bay moved elsewhere and the old department store on Seymour sat mostly empty for many years before the Kamloops Daily News moved in.
The paper closed its doors three years ago, the City bought the building, the dream of putting a first-class performing arts centre on the property died a year and a half ago and there the building sits, doing nobody any good.
There were plans in City Hall to demolish it, but then the City decided to invite confidential proposals for how better to use the building. The deadline was last April.
There were hints something would be announced by the end of last year or, at least, by the end of winter “if everything goes according to plan.”
So how are things going? Will the building be torn down? Will it be renovated as a less ambitious version of the performing arts centre? Will it become a retail-and-condo development? Or maybe just another parking lot?
I’m willing to venture there have been more than a few closed-door huddles on what to do as the building crumbles, yet we’re still in the dark.
Nine proposals came in from both private developers and community groups but a couple of weeks short of a year after the deadline for those proposals, the City is still — as far as one can tell — thinking things over.
Seems like a lot of thinking. Time, I think, to decide what to do with this once proud downtown edifice — and maybe the time has come (and I hate to say so) to tear it down and put up a parking lot.
