Staff looking at plan to build city yard on Bartley Road
West Kelowna city councillors have agreed with staff that phased-in plans for a new city hall would be too expensive and too inefficient.
Mayor Doug Findlater says both options would cost millions of dollars in just their first years, and borrowing money is also off the table after residents nixed that idea in a recent referendum.
The idea was to build a new city hall complex on Elliot Road.
He says staff has been instructed to come up with plan to construct a city yard on 10 acres of land on Bartley Road – it contains an office building which could ease current crowded conditions.
"It will relieve the pressure on the Mount Boucherie facility. A number of people that are in this facility could go there, and also we have two other satellite facilities that were former Irrigation District offices; there maybe some employees who are in those offices who could either move into Mount Boucherie or the new Public Works facility," he says.
Findlater says the city could also sell its property on Elliot Road, and another at Bartley Road and Highway 97, "and put the money into reserves for a city hall." He says the proprties are probably worth about a million dollars each, or more "and in the meantime, we'll continue to put money in the kitty, into reserves, towards a city hall," he says. "It will come later rather than sooner, but at the same time we have problems to address, so this is the way we propose to handle it; have a business plan brought back to us that we can then look at and decide how to go ahead with such a facility."
Findlater says there's also a substantial amount of gravel on the Bartley Road property which the city could sell to raise money
