By Taylor Breckles (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 12, 2014
Previously a branch of the Bank of Montreal (BMO), UFV’s downtown Chilliwack campus has been in renovations since last February, long surpassing projected opening dates.
Executive director of campus planning Craig Toews explains how UFV acquired the building in the first place — a donation from BMO.
“Across Canada, there’s a lot of aging downtowns that are in disrepair, and universities have become quite an interesting part of those revitalizations,” Toews says, noting that BMO wanted the building to go to good use.
Luckily for UFV, the Chilliwack Economic Development Corporation (CEDCO) was willing to pick up the tab for the entire project.
“CEDCO stepped up with an incredible offer. They said, ‘if you accept this gift from the Bank of Montreal, we’ll actually fix the building up and make it ready,” Toews says, “and so they stepped up with $650,000 to do that work.”
“When you couple CEDCO’s contribution and Bank of Montreal’s building, it’s about a $1.5 million gift; the largest gift UFV’s ever received,” Toews adds.
The building project is mainly run by CEDCO, with UFV providing the design requirements.
However, because of the arrangement and a lack of funds, the building has taken extra time to open. After the initial plans were drawn up, building costs exceeded the amount of available funding.
Now, with some budget expansion and reworking of the plan the project is back in progress, with a projected opening set for March or April.
“The city was really managing the project, so it was out of our control as to what decisions and resources they would put to the project. They were, of course, paying the whole bill, so we didn’t have much to say in that,” Toews says.
Building plans are usually targeted to open in August in order to be available for September course, and Toews admits this project missed that mark last summer. The hoped-for January opening was also dashed, but the schedules for continuing studies and programming didn’t align with the building plans anyway. Now, Toews says that the plans are relaxed as they progress toward opening for the September semester.
Though the university isn’t paying anything toward the project — which is known at the campus planning office as the Five Corners building — BMO isn’t looking for any type of promotions.
“There’s no naming of the building or something like that … there’s a covenant in the agreement that we wouldn’t, say, rent [the building] out to another bank … but nothing directly related to us having to promote the Bank of Montreal,” Toews explains. “They just wanted to gift the university with this and it was part of their mandate.
“We tried to recognize it as a kind gift and a very considerate gift, and that’s really what it was,” Toews says.
