Here are the guidlelines:
http://www.princegeorge.ca/cityhall/mayorcouncil/councilagendasminutes/agendas/2012/2012_08_27/documents/BL8447_8450_rpt_full_Guidelines.pdf

Nice presentation on past and current thinking about downtown development.

What people may not know is that we have had guildelines in the past which, the same ad the OCP, were not used when they should have been.

1. keep retail on the ground floor and avoid service oriented storefronts.

Walk around downtown to see the number of offices – original telemarketing storefronts, federal government building, bank office expansions (CIBC + BOM) engineering, lawyers, brain injured, etc.

2. provide transparency between outside and inside activity of buildings.

Walk around and look at how many have mirrored or “etched” glass at street level.

So why have these guidelines not worked?

They are guidelines!!!! NOT Standards!!

It is enlightening to read the words : “These are guidelines, they are not restrictive, they are flexible.” Good going!!! More of waht we have had … good guidelines to be broken each time someone wants something elese which then results in the progressive choking of the business downtown could be.

Waste of time, money, and expectations.

I really think that it would have been better to invest in some new ideas for the dying small town “downtown” design which does not try to emulate something which has happene3d naturally in larger cities of bygone years.

Perhaps it is time to look at a city without a centre “hub”, one which has a number of specialty nodes which allow people choices around which “node” they wish to reside.

Copenhagen has been developing in that direction. It’s citizens have repeatedly scored highest in the world on the “happiness” scale. The planning of the city has helped in that.

Sorry for the white space, folks. Long links and ads on the side do not mix anymnore.

These guidelines want a lot of wood on the outside of the buildings. Sounds great, we’re in wood country, right? We want to promote local industry.

The problem is that all the exterior wood products are not made anywhere near northern BC. In fact, they are made by our competition–competition that has been working very hard to shut down our wood industries.

Just more dreams and dreams are just that. Seems thats all they do at City hall. Thse pepole have lost sight of reality.
Cheers

An approaching Provincial Election has nothing to do with the timing of this announcement!
I wonder if they actually know what this building will be used for – put my mind at ease and make the building program public.

Another BOONDOGGLE financed by the taxpayer.

Why bother with this vote buying project.

In short order there won’t be any wood left to be innovative with.

Mills are going offline at a record pace.

What a joke this govt is!

Retired 2

“Just more dreams and dreams are just that. Seems thats all they do at City hall. Thse pepole have lost sight of reality.”

This project has nothing to do with City Hall, this is a Provincial Government initiative.

It has a little bit to do with the City. The City is in to this project for about $3.5 million. That’s not pocket change.

What I’d really like to know is what this building is going to be used for. It’s like we’re trying to drive a square peg into a round hole.

This isn’t the right location for UNBC classes. They should be up on the hill.

There are existing vacant retail locations and lots and lots of good vacant office space downtown.

Why are we using tax payer money to compete with those tax payers that are trying to get a return on the existing inventory?

I’ve always been a big liberal supporter, but this project is making me reconsider.

I wonder if the pawn shop balls hanging outside the main floor retail space will HAVE to made out of wood or will it just be a suggestion:)

It has a lot to do with City Hall.

While the report deals with the WIC it also speaks about downtown building and cityscape design guidelines and a link was provided to those guidelines. Those are City pipe dreams. I agree. Why do I agree? Simple! The City has many design guidelines, including guidelines which existed and may still exist for downtown.

The problem is, for this City in the last 20+ years, they may as well have been written on toilet paper; a total waste of money because they listen to money, not guidelines. The words of Ian Wells say it all about the mindset as City Hall.

“I wonder if they actually know what this building will be used for”

I agree with Icicle’s comment regarding rational use for the building.

It does not sound like they know yet waht it will be used for.

I think there will be uses for provincial services offices that are now occupying spaces in non-government owned buildings. I suspect Northern Health may be one of them.

They might even get UNBC to have a promotional presence of some sort there. I just cannot see splitting a potentially major teaching/research function from the main campus this early in its life. Everyone should get used to the fact that the University is on the hill and not downtown. I see nothing happening with the BOM building that was donated to UNBC. I already forget how many years ago has that been.

While it would be great to have retail on the ground floor, I am concerned that the space should have economic rents (rents based on cost of construction) in the $30+/sf range which will severely limit the potential interested parties. It was tried during better times when the Plaza 400 was built and failed big time.

Similar space associated with the Nanaimo Conference Centre downtown has been very slow in filling up, to say the least. I find that downtown Nanaimo has picked up considerably in recent years to a point which PG will have a hard time catching up to unless there is a major boom. Even then, I am afraid that this City will approve developments in other parts of the City when push comes to shove. Just look at how they jumped when the developer(s) said “jump” in order to tell them what the City wanted to see at the PG Golf course. That cost the City (us) some money!!

This is the rent asked for at the Nanaimo Conference Centre:
– Available Areas: 1,500.00 SF to 2,104.00 SF.
– Asking Rent: $15.00-17.00/SF + $10.00/SF
– Estimated Additional Rent = $25 to $27/sf.

Those are likely market rents, not economic rents.

There is a tenant improvement allowance of $20.00/SF. I think that “incentive” is there because the spaces have not been occupied yet since they opened several years ago.

http://www.collierscanada.com/1787

I would love to see the economic feasibility study for the WIC.

Sorry, made a mistake in the above rents. It should read:

This is the rent asked for at the Nanaimo Conference Centre:

– Available Areas: 1,500.00 SF to 2,104.00 SF.

– Asking Rent: $15.00-17.00/SF + $10.00/SF Estimated Additional Rent

– total estimated rent range = $25 to $27/sf.

I cannot think of any retailer in the downtown who could survive on that rent.

On average, a retail merchant such as electronics store, clothing store, kitchenwares, etc. would have to have something in the order of $750,000 gross sales per year out of the 1,500sf space. That equates to $500/sf.

Was Kroeler not pushing this project so he could get some of the engineering courses located in this building?

Bell mentioned in an interview with Ben a while back “there may be some retail space on the main floor, then office space, and possibly some housing on higher levels.

So who would the housing be for? Would it be in competition with the proposed site by the library and the commonwealth site?

Or would it be used for low income housing of which there is a shortage of. What about seniors? This will be interesting to see if there is any housing put on the 3rd floor….

Is the cross-laminate manufacturing plant in Okanagan Falls up-and-running yet?

The plant is up and running:
https://www.enewsletters.gov.bc.ca/Jobs_Tourism_and_Innovation/Edition_2/edition

This is the rent asked for at the Nanaimo Conference Centre:
– Available Areas: 1,500.00 SF to 2,104.00 SF.
– Asking Rent: $15.00-17.00/SF + $10.00/SF
– Estimated Additional Rent = $25 to $27/sf.

===========================================

For heavens sake Gus give us a break. Who cares what the rent is in Naniamo. And I should add that My Grand daughter goes to Island University in Naniamo. She is so smart.
Cheers

Retired 02 … I know you don’t … and I am not going to bother to explain it to you why they would be similar to buildings in PG because of exactly that reason … ;-)

As far as you daughter goes, maybe she could rent a place and start a VIU clubhouse there.

“The plant is up and running”

That is year-old news. That issue is from around mid 2011

I am curious why this report states the following:

“It could be just a couple of weeks before there is a SOLID DESIGN for the long promised wood innovation and design centre.”

The project procurement pahse is being handled by partnershipsbc at this stage. They have closed the Request for Qualifications and I assume they are assessing them now. At the end of that step, they will be short listing around 3 proponents who will likely be given a more detailed functional space program for the building and then begin to do a preliminary design for the building accompanied by a price.

So, I cannot see where this SOLID DESIGN will be coming from.

http://www.partnershipsbc.ca/files-4/project-widc.php

http://www.partnershipsbc.ca/files-4/documents/NR_WIDC_RFQ_April11.pdf

Retired 02’s thought process matches that displayed at city hall to a tee and is one reason downtown looks like it does…look at our situation in isolation instead of looking at what has worked and what has not in other communities, cherry pick the good ideas, attempt to avoid mistakes of others and maybe even learn something in the process.

This is the RFQ which went out and has now closed.

http://www.partnershipsbc.ca/files-4/documents/WIDCRFQCONFORMED.pdf

I notice that it states that “The Authority is in the process of completing its programming, INDICATIVE DESIGN design and drafting of the Statement of Requirements.”

I like those words “INDICATIVE DESIGN”

In layman’s language it means “Any similarity between the INDICATIVE DESIGN and the FINAL DESIGN from which working drawings will be done is purely coincidental. ;-)

From the opinion 250 report:
“The Request for Qualifications has closed, and final decisions are soon to be revealed on who will make it to the shortlist of preferred proponents.”

We have the end of August. According to the RFQ document, that stage was planned to be reached by the end of June/2012. So, we are running 2 months late at this stage.

BUT, construction was supposed to be commenced in January 2013 …. Push it ahead another month or two and we will hit optimum construction start weather for this part of the world.

Actually, the BMO building is used extensively by UNBC. It houses a very successfully community counselling center where graduate students work with community members who oterhwise could not afford counselling, under close supervision from faculty. I have benefited greatly from this service. They also hold workshops there for workers in the community and I believe that workshop presenters are asked to make a small donation to the center to help it break even. While I don’t support UNBC holding classes downtown, there are a lot of other university needs which could be better met there.

Heres the bottom line.

Prince George does not need a Wood Innovation Building, especially one that will cost us $75 Million or more. What is it going to be used for??

Better still. Who the hell ever asked for this building. Certainly not the taxpayers of Prince George or BC. Is this building going to compete with private business??? If so why???

The fact of the matter is this;

BC is for all intents and purposes broke. We have spent every bloody cent we have collected, and are skimming money from Hydro, ICBC, etc; etc; just to stay afloat. The City of Prince George is also insolvent, or very close to it.

So are we all insane??? Do we ever give a thought to what the hell is going on around us. We have an infrastructure problem that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no idea where we are going to get the money to solve this problem. So what do we do.

We **Gift** the property for this building to the Provincial Government, so that they can build a bloody wooden monstrosity to show off how to build with wood, while at the same time, we built a new school, police station, cancer clinic, and other buildings out of steel and concrete.

This building is nothing more than a bid by the Liberals to get some votes, and has absolutely no actual need in this City.

Lets quit the BS and start to spend our money on things that are important, and by that I dont mean twinning the highway to Cache Creek which is another BS project. Everyone with a modicum of a brain knows that Highway 16 West is where the road money should have been spent.

We will have spent $28 Million on Boundry Road by the time its finished, and I suggest to you that once its finished it will have very little bearing on the overall picture for the City of Prince George. At best we can expect some business’s downtown, to relocate at the Airport and thats about that.

Time to tell the politicians to grow up and to start to solve real problems, instead of building, buildings.

Have a nice day.

“Have a nice day.” It’s after 7 pm, so you are obviously referring to tomorrow! I will try my best to ignore the above gloom and doom and have a great day tomorrow!

BTW, I saw an automated pothole patching machine at work on the Bypass, patching cracks and potholes for YRB! It’s the same make I recommended about 4 or 5 years ago to the city to have a look at…it work’s well for YRB, but (I have been told) it wouldn’t work for the City!

Hmmm….

There is no need for anyone to flog that dead horse called “downtown revitalization” during an upcoming provincial election. Save that for the few weeks running up to our own municipal election. It has always been that way and I think it should remain that way.

“Is this building going to compete with private business??? If so why???”

Two answers …..

1. right now there is no competition to speak of … in other words, I do not think that we need additional office space downtown. We also do not need additional retail space downtown. If we did need retail space, existing spaces would be rented and there would be an escalation in price.

If my statement is untrue, then I would ask someone from IPG, which is the organization which should have their fingers on that information, to make it available for easy finding and viewing on their web page. The Regional District Development Corp used to makethat information available.

2. Government procurs office space in various ways, some is owned and some is rented. In addition, there are different systems of “renting”. If they build a building, then they will move some office spaces out of existing “private” buildings and they will be freed up for other renters. It appears that private industry is not building any new office buildings. The last one was the BDC building which was, I believe, to house BCR offices.

Canfor buiklds its own office buildings, why shouldn’t government do the same for some of the exact same reasons.

There should be retail opportunities on the ground floor because we do not need any “dead” storefront potentials such as the 3 sides of Plaza 400, the Telus Building, the Royal Bank building, the Scotia building, the Oxford building, the old Kresge building and even the City Furniture building. They have people in them which keep lunch places busy, but that is about it. The do not draw shoppers or anyone other than workers and a few customers of the service industry offices to them.

“BC is for all intents and purposes broke”

Not in this world Palopu …. apply the same measure you use to other provinces and other countries and you are wrong.

“The City of Prince George is also insolvent, or very close to it.”

Not true either. You are not including the Terasen deal in you calculation

Prince George. Dont know how you can get doom and gloom out of my post. All I talked about was Government waste. Is it the Government waste of tax dollars that make you doomy and gloomy.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Monday.
**We’ve done a lot through the tax system to encourage Canadian executives,business people, to start utilizing some of the capital they have on their balance sheets. At a certain point, its not up to the Government to stimulate the economy, its up to the private sector, and they have lots of captital**

Pat Bell basically parroted the same message in another paper to-day.

I agree with this 100 percent. I am sick and tired of spending tax dollars on projects that basically help certain types of business’s but do diddy squat for the average taxpayer.

Business’s can plow their own fields or let it lie fallow. I and others like me are not their slaves. If they cannot make a dollar without Government projects, then they should get the hell out of the business.,

Have a nice day., (Whatevers left)

“We have an infrastructure problem that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no idea where we are going to get the money to solve this problem”

So does this entire country, some places, such as Quebec, more than others. So does the USA and many other countries. As a Eurtpean will tell you and will have told you for at least half a century, is because the USA and Canada work on quarterly reports not on 5 years, 20 years, and longer periods. In other words, sustainable is only a buzz word, but they really do not understand what it really means in every day business practice.

Who was it that said that corporations a swimming in money and they need to reinvest it in their companies or else give it back to the shareholders because they will know where to reinvest it. I can understand that point of view, but it means that if times continue to stay tough, then the money to stay afloat will have been misspent and the business could fail.

Countries when hit by the devastation of war, huricanes, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. have infrastructure problems too. But they get over it. They rebuild, and as a reult are oftne better off than if those disasters had not happened.

We have to get off our behinds, realize the potentials of this country and fix it.

Palopu, your kind of thinking is of absolutely no help in that. Identifying problems is one thing, fixing them is another matter entirely. Today’s economy is so dependent on the dollar continuing to be circulated that we cannot come up with purported solutions that stop that cycle.

Aside from the debate of where is best to locate this wood inovation center is the question of why the producers of the wood products are not contributing to the cost of building it?

Should taxpayers be forced to expend their money for the free advertisement and marketing promotions of the forest industry? That is what this really is.

Everytime an architect, engineer, interiro designer, landscape architect, lending bank, contractor, subtrades, steel supplier, etc. has anything to do with a building, their name goes up in lighs on job site sign boards, in the media, on their web sites, etc.

This is no different, except that the company has provided the capacity to build such panels. They are, BTW, already well known in the business of laminated timber and have been manfacturing for some large and very unique building projects across this countr and I believe in the USA as well.

It is just that they are not operating out of Prince George, but the Peticton area, the centre of the universe. There is absolutely nothing that would prevent someone to start a company like that in PG.

Distance to market is obviously not a deal breaker.

BTW, the company that invented the cross lamnted wood panel construction system is in Austria in a relatively remote part of Austria between there and northern Italy. They supplied the panels for the present tallest CLT panel building in London England. Again, distance was not too much of a deal breaker.

“Should taxpayers be forced to expend their money for the free advertisement and marketing promotions of the forest industry”

Yup, been doing it for many decades in concert with industry. After all, the raw product is owned by the taxpayers. Want to promote it so that companies will bother to cut it and use it? Hey, better promote that idea ….. that is the way it works in the world of commerce.

Here is the web site of the company in Penticton. Read the history carefully, see how they improved their qulity and capacity over a 50 year period, and then look at some of the projects in the portfolio.

http://www.structurlam.com/about

That is what I call value added wood manufacturing for the construction industry at its finest. If the WIC ever gets built and it is designed using CLT, they will no doubt be the plant that will get that job by virtue of there being no one else able to do it at the moment.

One more thing.

I think that the designers of the buildings and the plants who do research in oder to enable the production of such laminated timber construction should be paid by the MoF for using the feedstock of our forests to develop those products into a sought after product so that we can “benefit” from that investment in our provincial resources …. ;-)

Gus, you mentioned that the Scotiabank Building and the Royal Bank Building don’t have retail on the ground floor. Are there not banks on the ground floor?

Don’t the banks attract lots of customers? I’ve had to wait 20-30 minutes at times just to see a teller.

Under another post, you mentioned that it’s okay for government to build a building for their own purposes. I sort of agree with this, but wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to buy an existing building for their own purposes? The assessed values on some of these buildings are about $100 per square foot. The cost of building the WIDC is estimated to be around $400 per square foot. I believe the Federal Government bought the Oxford building for exactly this reason.

I don’t think it will help our community to use to tax dollars just to increase the office vacancy rate…

Gus. BC is broke, and the City is broke, it matters little whether we include the Terasen gas deal or not. In fact with the low interest rates I seriously doubt that we are making anything on the gas deal.

When Governments have to find all sorts of various ways to make ends meet, like writing speeding tickets, gambling, increasing service charges, skimming money from various Govt entities, its because they are ***Broke***

The City is looking at selling off some of its assets and doing some downsizing. This is because they are basically insolvent.

The present City debt is somewhere around $105 Million and rising. Debt servicing is approx $13 Million per year and rising, infrastructure repairs, ie; roads, water sewer, etc is falling behind and the City does not have a clue, as to how they can get on top of this problem/.

Making excuses or comparing us to other places around the world serves no practical purpose. Our problem is here in Prince George, and it is here that we will have to solve it.

Its a huge problem, and I have yet to hear anyone come up with a solution.

Why is that???

Palopu:
We live in a city that feels its good PR to dig up all the streets to have a few buildings on a fantasy heating system. Millions borrowed and spent for what ? Inconvenience and lumpy patched roads. No doubt more trouble in the future.

INSANITY!

“Its a huge problem, and I have yet to hear anyone come up with a solution.

Why is that???”

I gave you an answer to that question. If you don’t want to look at how they do it in other places, then that is your problem and the problem of others who tink it is a problem.

Over time, some cities and some states of the USA have found themselves in similar situations. Other than Detroit, most are still around and many are doing quite well.

The New Jersey governor has boasted at the current Republican Convention that they squeezed the teachers which helped the states finances. Maybe we can squeeze the forest workers and the miners here. Pick a group … how about welders, they earn a heck of a lot of money??!!!

Tough fat guy he is. If you don’t like my suggesion, maybe that is what we need, a tough fat teacher bashing guy. That’ll solve all our problems ….