Before going any further with plans for a proposed community centre, the Town of Bowden is seeking potential partners for the project.
Before going any further with plans for a proposed community centre, the Town of Bowden is seeking potential partners for the project.
The town has contracted Edmonton-based RC Strategies, a consulting company specializing in community development, to prepare a business plan for the proposed community centre and at Bowden council’s April 14 meeting, the firm presented a roadmap of how it intends to prepare that plan.
The intention to develop a business plan for the centre comes after needs assessments and feasibility studies carried out in the past three years.
While completion of the plan would allow the town to become "shovel ready" in order to receive grants and other sources of funding for the proposed centre, council decided to hold off on going any further with efforts to develop the plan until the town can secure partners to help develop the project.
Two partners the town has reached out to at this point are the Bowden Agricultural Society and Red Deer County, said Andy Weiss, the town’s chief administrative officer.
The town is seeking partners, he added, because it believes the community centre concept will be a "regional benefit."
"The other thing is, regional initiatives are quite typically looked on more favourably these days than individual initiatives when it comes to grant funding," Weiss said. "It isn’t, in council’s mind, prudent to begin planning on something without bringing everybody to the table at the entry level."
If the town is successful with finding partners for the project, council could give RC Strategies the go-ahead to develop the business plan, Weiss said.
It is the town’s hope, he added, that the business plan will move the project closer to becoming a reality.
"We’ve done a lot of these studies and we’ve looked at various studies and plans for a community centre a number of times in the past and we really don’t want this to be another document that sits gathering dust on the shelf. And because of that, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying, at the end of the day, to have a document that isn’t created for the citizens of the region. It’s a document created by the citizens of the region."
Mayor Robb Stuart, who said the town is in "desperate need" of a new community hall, echoed Weiss’s comments.
"We keep doing feasibility studies and looking at available grants, but never seem to go any further," he said.
As part of its presentation to council at the April 11 meeting, RC Strategies talked about the possible size of the proposed community centre and potential costs that have come up in previous studies.
Such studies considered the idea of building a centre at Bowden’s Centennial Park with a banquet hall capable of holding 300 people along with a stage, kitchen and meeting room.
The proposed cost for the centre concept included in the studies was $3.1 million with an annual operating cost of $150,000.
While Weiss reiterated that council has "put the brakes on" when it comes to considering any details of the proposed project including size or cost, he said if the project were to go ahead, funding could come from a number of sources including the town’s existing reserves, grants such as municipal sustainability initiative (MSI) funding, money from regional partners and corporate and private donations.
Operating costs, he added, should be funded by the users of the centre but there could be a need for subsidies from taxpayers.
Should the town go ahead with the development of a business plan, Weiss said, it would include a community consultation component such as a survey.
One potential question the survey could ask is whether taxpayers are prepared to assist in funding the community centre concept.
If the answer is "no," he said, the entire process of looking at the community centre concept could come to a halt.
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