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VOL. 27 NO. 1
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Camp plan advances
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
By JOSH MASSEY
PLANS FOR a work camp to accommodate up to 400 people advanced April 14 with city council giving third readings for changes to bylaws and to the city's official community plan for the facility to be located on the city-owned Skeena Industrial Development Park located just south of the Northwest Regional Airport. Councillors also got a look at maps of where the camp would be located and took comments from adjacent land users and others. The camp is to be run by Falcon Camp Services of Prince George for people working on the Pacific Trails Pipeline and Chevron/Apache Kitimat LNG plant at Kitimat. It's to be located on land at the industrial park just purchased by the Kitselas First Nations' Development Corporation (KDC) and then leased to Falcon Camp Services. Current plans have the camp at between 200 to 400 people, but the company said that number may grow in the future. At the public hearing, city planner David Block presented questions posed by the Kitselas Development Corporation regarding the city's $500 fee it would charge for every bed at the facility over a total of 500 to a maximum of 3,000 beds allowed, which was contained in the zoning bylaw amendment for permitted uses on the heavy industrial lands. This section of the land agreement is designed to build a fund towards affordable housing but the KDC wondered why the city wasn't going to share some of those profits in the spirit of the airport lands agreement struck between the Kitselas and the city that outlines a profit sharing regime. It wondered if the city would share the fee with the corporation and if that fee would apply to other work camps on city-owned land. In reply, Block said the fee is meant to finance city-initiated affordable housing efforts and that the city was not entertaining any other work camp proposals within its boundaries. A permit for the location was granted April 14 but it was not an approval for the camp but instead only for equipment storage, pipeline pipe storage and for offices, he said. The report to council also contained a statement from KDC general manager Jim Dopson.
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ANNA KILLEN PHOTO
■ Breaking ground KEVIN AND Virginia Goddard of Deep Creek Masonry stand in front of the future Sleeping Beauty Estates – just one of many housing developments in the works for Terrace. Also, have you seen how much houses are going for in Kelowna? See Page 5 for more.
Businesses encouraged to open on Sunday By ANNA KILLEN THE TERRACE Downtown Improvement Area (TDIA) is setting its sights on Sunday shoppers and encouraging businesses to consider staying open on Sundays. There is already a small core of businesses open on Sundays, said TDIA representative Dennis Lissimore, but TDIA would like to see that core grow. “With the construction stuff and all of the new people coming to
Festival best See who won some of the awards at the Pacific Northwest Music Festival \COMMUNITY B1
town, people coming in from Kitimat and Aiyansh and other places, and lots of people working now, for a lot of people the only day they have to shop is Sunday,” he said. “We're not going to see a huge majority of people opening on Sundays right away, that's not going to happen. But as the economy picks up around here, there is an opportunity.” TDIA has been doing work with Rogers Brooks International, a downtown business area consult-
ing company, and studies cited by that body show that “about 70 per cent of all shopping is done on the weekends and after 5 o’clock at night,” he said. But with many of Terrace's downtown businesses not open after 5 o’clock or on Sundays, those shoppers are forced to big box stores. The Skeena Mall is also open on Sundays. “We do have a core of businesses that are open now, and it's improving,” he said, noting that one problem is that it takes time to
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build up a Sunday customer base. While it's a slow process, some of the businesses that have been opening on Sundays say it was becoming their second or third busiest day of the week, he said. “That starts to add up when you start to have some good Sundays in a row,” he said. “You know, Bechtel was bringing two or three busses of people in here, dropping them off Sunday morning and they're basically here all day in town and very few businesses open.”
Staffing is one issue businesses note when considering opening on Sundays, he said, with some smaller businesses staffed by families who like to have the day off together. “But that being said, there is opportunity for business on Sunday, so hopefully there's kind of that tradeoff of people wanting to take advantage of [more shoppers in the area],” he said. TDIA will be posting signage on open businesses and more downtown activities are in the works.
Slam dunk Terrace’s Marek Ormerod is playing for Team BC for the third year in a row \SPORTS B12