IT’S KIND of like the troubled kid in school that no one knows what to do with but everyone wants to improve.
Ever since the city used taxpayer’s money to buy the former Co-op building in the downtown core, groups have come out with all sorts of ideas for this piece of public property. It’s an old topic – the city should do this, the city should do that.
City council’s still looking at costs to demolish the building, and it’s taken six years to get this far. Where will it find the money to have this space really reach its full potential? It probably can’t, unless the public wants to wait years and years for movement.
So maybe the answer would be to sell, but there’s the danger of being stuck with a Shames Mountain type scenario – you want to keep the asset for the good of the community, but no one in the community has the money to buy it and do it up right. And outside interests may not necessarily have the same vision for the area and sentiments for the old spot that locals have.
But so far, all that has been done is a strip down of the building’s assets and a dressing up of the outside – and some people in the community would call it a dressing down.
Progress seems to take the form of a glacier melting; you know it’s melting, decades later you can see the difference, but at the time it seems like it’s at a standstill.
Talk is great, but at some point, action is needed.