Revelstoke’s city hall could finally be getting a facelift.
The City of Revelstoke received $200,000 from the Columbia Basin Trust’s Built Heritage Grant to repair the exterior cladding of city hall.
However, the city still needs about another $400,000 to complete the work, said Dawn Low, the city’s director of corporate administration.
“It was removed from the budget however the exterior is still deteriorating so we need to do something,” she said. “I’m looking for alternative sources of funding. We have a building reserve as well that we can use to back it.”
CBT announced $1.4 million in funding to 16 projects around the basin on Tuesday. The three year, $6.15 million program was set up to help groups preserve, rehabilitate and restore heritage buildings. Two more grant intakes will take place in 2018 and 2019.
“Heritage buildings are markers of our history, add character to our communities and remain valuable for many types of activities,” said Wayne Lundeberg, Columbia Basin Trust’s director of delivery of benefits. “Improving them for both today and tomorrow—whether they’re important architecturally, culturally, visually, for tourism or otherwise—is one of our priorities.”
The city has been talking about replacing or removing the stucco on city hall since at least 2010, when it announced plans to fix the crumbling exterior.
However, a protest from the Canadian Art Deco Society stopped the plan in its tracks. Instead, the city spent $23,000 to study the building. Donald Luxton, a heritage building consultant who wrote the letter protesting the proposed repairs, prepared a report that recommended the city remove the stucco, which was installed in 1972, and restore the building to its original condition of painted concrete.
Since then, the city has held off on doing anything. The 2015 capital plan pegged the cost of repairing the exterior at $540,000 and last year council voted for a scaled-back plan to remove part of the stucco to be able to inspect the condition of the concrete before proceeding.
Low said that work revealed the concrete was crumbling and couldn’t be rehabilitated. Instead, the city will proceed with replacing the stucco. The expected cost of the work is now about $600,000.
“Heritage BC and CBT agree and understand that,” she said. “It’s quite a popular building with Heritage BC and they’re quite thrilled we want to rehabilitate it.”