St. Albert's city administration is recommending the city build a new combined museum and interpretive centre at Heritage Park, rather than expand the museum within St. Albert Place.
St. Albert's city administration is recommending the city build a new combined museum and interpretive centre at Heritage Park, rather than expand the museum within St. Albert Place.
Interim city manager Chris Jardine presented an evaluation of several options to council at the Sept. 6 meeting, and council approved a postponed motion to further discuss the issue as part of budget deliberations for 2017.
He explained he authored the “high-level conceptual report” in-house at council's direction, and as such the proposals include rough cost estimates for use as comparison, rather than precise figures.
He examined five options for building four large capital projects the city has coming down the pipe: an expanded museum, a branch library, new art-gallery space, and an interpretive centre at Heritage Park.
Jardine determined building the new combined facility makes the most economic sense in the long term – a slightly larger outlay of capital investment than the current plan, but with the potential of reducing other needed capital investments in the future.
“It's not a perfect slam dunk because we do have some site considerations we need to look at it, but in the overall package if we're going to spend that amount of money, it makes the most sense overall,” he said.
The five options considered all account for four capital projects coming down the pipe for the city: an expanded museum, a branch library, new art-gallery space, and an interpretive centre at Heritage Park. The need for more office space for city staff, and how that could be accommodated, also factored into the comparisons.
The first option Jardine presented is the current plan for museum expansion, which would displace finance department staff from the main floor of St. Albert Place, moving them to the second floor and ultimately requiring 4,000 square feet of additional office space, which the city would have to build or lease. This would mean a combined cost of $31.9 million for the four projects, plus an annual operating cost of $1.6 million.
The second option, moving the museum and gallery into the current library space and creating a new, bigger stand-alone library rather than building a smaller branch library, would cost $38.5 million up front and $2.1 million annually.
The third option, which Jardine recommended, would see the art gallery move into the current museum space once a combined museum and interpretive centre is built at Heritage Park, would cost $33.2 million up front with $1.7 million in annual operating costs.
The fourth option of building a new stand-alone museum in addition to the other required project would result in a capital cost of $33.1 million with $1.8 million in annual operating costs.
Finally, Jardine looked at the possibility of building a new museum and gallery on new sites, at a cost of $34.6 million up front with $1.8 million in operating costs.
He noted he also looked at the options for leasing space instead of building in all these situations, but after considering the 20-year cost of building versus leasing, building makes more sense for the city.
Although councillors accepted his report for information and agreed to discuss the capital project charters as part of the 2017 budget deliberations, several councillors expressed concerns about the report.
Coun. Sheena Hughes noted the figures in the report did not seem particularly accurate, and questioned the validity of comparisons made based on them, to which Jardine reiterated the numbers are meant to provide comparisons and not precise budget estimates, and regardless precise building-cost estimates are nearly impossible to come by.
“I'll guarantee a construction price when I've issued the last payment,” he said.
Hughes also suggested the possibility of building a single library and converting the current library space to staff offices could be a good option, which Jardine said was impractical because of the library's layout and high ceilings.
Coun. Cam MacKay said he would support discussing this project at budget time, but would not support the proposed museum and interpretive centre at that time given the high-priority arena and pool projects council will already have to find money for.
“This, to me, looks like something for 2022 or 2023,” he said. “The conceptual plan is interesting to look at it, but when the rubber meets the road this isn't something I'd approve a borrowing bylaw for.”
Ann Ramsden, the director of the Arts & Heritage Foundation that oversees the museum and Heritage Park, said she was supportive of the recommended option because it appeared to be best both in terms of efficiency, and in terms of providing the greatest benefit to visitors.
