Prince George, B.C. – The society promoting the proposed Performing Arts Centre in Prince George is trying to rally public support to help bring such as centre to fruition.

Earlier this week the PAC Society launched a new website and media campaign to try to clear up what it calls misconceptions about the facility and to get people talking to “move the project forward.”  The most common misconceptions, according to PAC Society chair Kirk Gable, surround the issues of cost and need.

The last cost projection came out in 2010 at $42.5 million.  Gable says he has not seen an updated figure as yet but adds “in general I think the consultants will tell you that every year you wait will cost you another 2% just in inflationary terms.”  Gable says until the final design work is done putting out a figure would be nothing more than speculation.  “At this point what we have is a concept drawing that says roughly, this is what we hope to build.  Between that and doing construction drawings and actually getting something built there’s always some changes, hopefully not adding cost, but you don’t know.”

Gable points to the cost of the planned 4th Avenue changes, including switching from one-way to two-way traffic, as an example of how costs can rise.  “We had a recent example of a project that was expected to cost $400 thousand and, due to the fact that there’s so much construction work going on everywhere else this summer, they only had one bidder”, a bid which was more than double the estimated cost of the project.  Gable says “and from the contractor’s perspective, well let’s throw a high bid in there and see what happens.  If nobody else bids on it well there you go, you just made some good money, if you can deliver.”

Gable says cost “all depends on what the economic climate is like at the time construction is announced, whether there are lots of contractors available, whether they’re willing to cut their prices, who knows?”

When I last spoke with Gable in March, he quoted from a 2012 report to council that the society estimated operating costs of a performing arts centre at about a million dollars a year and income generated by the centre at $700 thousand, resulting in a $300 thousand shortfall in the first year which would have to be subsidized.  He says “at the time that was the best information that we had from the theatre consultants that had been hired to do a pro forma business plan that looked at the most likely scenarios in terms of the number of shows, ticket prices and how it would all work out in terms of an operation.  And these are people that have been running theatres their whole lives, so we took their advice at face value.”  He says he has no update on operating and maintenance costs and expects there may be more light shed in that area when a city staff report is presented to council on July 7th.

Funding.  Where would the money come from to build a centre?  It would be a four-way split with funding from the federal, provincial and civic governments as well as from the private sector.  We asked Gable if the society has sought out private sector funds for the project, should it go ahead.  “The answer is yes and no.  The work that we’ve done has been to organize around a fundraising campaign.  The fundraising campaign has not actually started yet and it’s, to be fair it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.”

“The problem is, before we can go to the private sector we need to know that there’s a reasonable chance that the project is going to happen.  The most likely scenario will be Prince George City Council declares it a priority project, starts to put some meat on the bones in terms of how it’s going to be funded, where it’s going to be located, how their portion of the financing will be raised.  And the city has lots of assets to bring to the table on that, and there’s various ways that it could be financed or funded from the city’s participation, and then of course there’s the whole issue of senior governments, provincial and federal funding, and will they be willing to come to the party.”

Gable says it’s at that point “that you start to identify key private sponsors or funders, but that work is all just in the planning stages at this point.  We’ve certainly been approached by people who feel that they’re prepared to spearhead a fundraising campaign and they’ve already identified a number of people in the community that are prepared to participate, but at this point it’s all very preliminary.”

The new media campaign points to a 2008 study which found the current arts and entertainment facilities in the city are insufficient for our size and are technically limited for attracting world class shows.  We asked Gable how that statement can be made when the highly-technical Cirque du Soleil was just recently booked into CN Centre for a run beginning New Year’s Eve.   “That’s a question of what is adequate, right?  What I can tell you is that we essentially have one large theatre and one small theatre here, we’re talking about public facilities.  Theatre Northwest is a private facility but, in fact, we would like to encourage them to be part of the Performing Arts Centre.  But we have two public facilities here that are used for live performances, Vanier Hall and the Playhouse.”

Regarding the Playhouse, Gable calls it “a fine facility, it’s well-designed, it works just fine for what it was designed for.  It’s sitting on a very valuable piece of real estate at the corner of (highways) 16 and 97, and frankly it’s in the wrong place.  Some day somebody with deep pockets will come along and say, “I’ll give you ten million bucks for it.”   He says Vanier Hall is a 50-year-old high school auditorium which simply isn’t adequate in a number of ways for theatre, music or stage plays.  Gable says he has heard suggestions that Vanier Hall be renovated but says “the rough estimates that I’ve heard indicate that you’d probably spend $30 million if you had to do that, just to make that a proper performing arts centre.”

Gable says Vanier Hall is owned by the school district “and is used for school functions about 240 days in the year.  So is it really available for the general public to do other performance entertainment?  Sometimes it is, most of the time it isn’t.”

That raises the question, how many days a year would a brand new PAC be used?  Gable responds, “it would be like 365 days a year.  I think there’s a good demand and there’s a lot of unmet demand.”  Asked where that 365-day figure comes from, Gable says “the way that we arrived at that was by looking at all of the current performance groups and offerings that are currently produced in Prince George, as well as looking at the bigger market outside of Prince George where touring groups are moving around the country.  And the folks that did the business plan said, well this is what normally happens when you have a theatre or facility of this type.  Those touring groups start to look at it as an opportunity.”

Gable says “one of the things that may not be readily obvious, and I know that Andy Beasley and Glen Mikkelson over at CN Centre have had a pretty good run at attracting touring shows, but there’s a lot of other stuff that doesn’t come here because there isn’t a facility that’s suitable.  CN Centre is a hockey rink and the acoustics, to be polite, are lousy.  And if you need to pack four or five thousand people into a venue then you make do and you figure out ways to do it.  But there’s a whole lot of other stuff out there that doesn’t come to Prince George that would come if we had a proper facility and if it were available.”

Gable mentions music events, comedy, dance, theatre, ballet, opera as performance activities  that don’t come here and then adds, “Prince George, to its credit, has managed to figure out ways to do those things on a shoestring in facilities like church basements and other types of facilities for years.”

“The other thing that needs to be considered here is how would a facility like this impact revitalization in our downtown and where do entertainment facilities belong?  How do we use them to our best advantage to help drive other private sector enterprises, such as restaurants and retail and pubs and those kinds of things?  I guess there’s an opportunity there to add some momentum to that project at the same time.”

Gable says “I think at some point the community needs to recognize that this is an important piece of social infrastructure that will help this community grow.”  As for the suggestion that it is an important piece to a limited few, and that taxpayers would be accommodating a small portion of the population, Gable says “I honestly don’t know where those ideas come from.  I get it that they think we’re elitist and that we’re just catering to some little snobby group of people that want to go to the opera on Saturday afternoon or something.”

“I’m going to give you another for instance for those people specifically to think about.  He then spun a tale of how a “group of elitists” put together the first theatre group in this region in Barkerville in 1865.  “For some reason these elitists thought that the dirty, muddy miners would somehow appreciate their elitist product and amazingly enough they actually built a theatre there in 1868 to accommodate these elitists.”

Gable says “there’s a lot of people who will enjoy a performing arts centre that may never go to an opera or may never attend a ballet, but they might love to go and hear a heavy metal concert or might love to go and listen to a world class comedian, or they might be part of a university lecture series or a TED talk that provides them with some other kind of face-to-face contact with humans.”

“And, I guess we could all just sit in our basements and watch Youtube videos on our smart phones, that’s entertainment.  But I think there’s something to be said about having live entertainment and venues to do live entertainment and I think we owe that to our kids in terms of being able to participate in those kinds of activities.  So I would say that it’s not a frivolous want of the privileged, elitist few.  I would say that it’s a need and something that we all would be appreciative of, once it happened.”

One of the main points made by those who oppose proceeding with a performing arts centre at this time, is affordability.  Can the city afford it?  To which Gable says “without any information about what it’s really going to cost, or without any information about what we’re spending on other facilities, for some reason they’ve picked this one to tag the affordability argument to.”

“I would say that pretty much most of the civic facilities that we all enjoy, including parks and recreation and hockey rinks and soccer fields and on and on, they don’t operate at a profit.  They’re something that are provided for the citizens of the community to grow and expand the community.  I guess it depends on whether you’re a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of people and if all they can think about is, we can’t afford this, ask them why they think its okay for us to be spending $10 million on road repair this year.  I guess I would argue that a Performing Arts Centre is as much a necessity as having smooth roads for happy motoring.”  Gable says he’s all for happy motoring but wonders “why aren’t they hollering about that affordability.  Sorry, but I don’t buy that.”

So the PAC Society has supporters for a centre and there are those who oppose it at this time.  Should the taxpayers be able to democratically vote on the matter in a referendum this November?  Gable replies, “when did we decide that we had to do everything by referendum?  Did anybody ask for a referendum when we said we were going to spend $10 million for road repair?  There are rules in place around what city councils can do.  There are rules around when and where they have to go to referendum.  I don’t know if this project would be one of them, if it is so be it.”

“What I hear is a group of people who think that they don’t like this idea therefore it should go to a referendum, and that’s their version of democracy.  They’re saying that “we should get a vote on this because we deserve to have a vote”.  Well, we didn’t ask anybody whether we should have a referendum when we spent $16 million on a rec centre, did we?”

Noting that there are both supporters and opponents of the project we suggested that the definitive answer, yes or no, could once and for all be given to the issue through a referendum, Gable says he disagrees “that every decision that somebody gets riled about should be taken to a referendum.  To me it doesn’t sound like a great idea, but I would suggest that question be reserved for those who sit at the council table who are charged with finding ways to finance this.”