By Cheryl Jahn

Arts community keen for the Downtown core review

Jan 29, 2024 | 2:42 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – There are two empty lots in the downtown. One where the Four Seasons Leisure used to stand and where Fire Hall #1 sat adjacent. There’s also the Kopar Memorial Arena, one of the oldest facilities in the city in bad need of either some serious TLC or demolition. Those are all questions the city is grappling with. But aside from City Hall, two strange bedfellows – the sporting community and the arts community – have been meeting to hash out some ideas of their own.

“I always say sports are part of our culture. Arts are part of culture,” says Eli Klasner, Executive Director of the Community Arts Council. “We all want the same thing for our community. We want choices. We want options. We want recreational activities. We want events. We want the exact same things. I think sometimes the wedge that this artificial wedge that has been described between the arts and sports community is just that it’s artificial.”

The idea of an arts facility goes back as far as 2018, when the Community Arts Council was to take conduct of the Farmers’ Market location on Third Avenue.

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The site of the former Four Seasons Leisure Pool has become an ad hoc parking lot while the site of the former Fire Hall has been fenced off. Klasner believes the longer it stays that way, the longer it will stay that way.

“Nature abhors a vacuum and we leave that space open and empty long enough. It’s going to be really hard to to kind of repurpose it. I think we have to strike one. We can We’ve waited a long time. There is the basis of funding available through the Fortis gas fund and other opportunities. We have partners within the arts and sporting community that also have access to their own funding sources.

He believes a third party should be brought to identify opportunities.