ACC expanding into Victoria campus

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This article was published 01/11/2019 (2239 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One might think that Assiniboine Community College’s Victoria Avenue East campus was obsolete given high-profile developments to the North Hill campus in the last decade, but recent actions show there’s still life left in the site.

While portions of the Victoria campus have been left unoccupied in the last several years, recent work in these spaces has re-asserted the importance of the site.

It’s a lower-cost alternative to continuing development on the North Hill campus, which Assiniboine president Mark Frison said would need federal and provincial funding to continue.

“Renovating the space here is advantageous from a cost perspective,” Frison said. “If we were to renovate a building at the North Hill, you’re talking about very large projects.”

Frison said that the province had initially wanted Assiniboine to vacate the building so it could be used for other purposes, but didn’t find a suitable replacement purpose. In 2016, the province asked Assiniboine if they were interested in re-occupying the space.

“When I came here five years ago, we were using 170,000 square feet of roughly 280,000 square feet,” said Jim Simmons, Assiniboine’s director of capital projects. “Right now we are probably up to just under 200,000 and we’ll probably be at about 210,000 when we finish these projects we’re looking at.”

If all goes as planned, Assiniboine’s new food processing centre, co-funded by the federal government, the province, Maple Leaf, HyLife, Manitoba Pork, UFCW Local 832 and Brandon Hog & Livestock will be open next week.

Those groups collectively chipped in $640,000 toward the construction of the centre.

This big new centre has been built with sterility in mind as students will get hands-on experience processing meats in various ways.

Frison told the Sun during a tour of the centre that the meat that students process will be put up for sale at a nearby storefront currently under construction.

Students are already taking classes elsewhere on campus, but will be able to move on to the hands-on lessons once the centre opens. It’s hoped that this facility will be able to address the labour shortage faced by the industry.

As the Sun reported earlier this year, the local Maple Leaf plant is running under capacity because of a dearth of skilled workers.

Things like ham and sausages will be available to the public, though Frison said he has heard from other institutions with similar setups that people within the building are most likely to scoop up the best stuff.

The on-campus daycare and early learning centre is getting an expansion that will add 20 new spots and allow the facility to care for infants for the first time.

Frison said this move will likely help with the lengthy waiting list for the daycare. When he first arrived at Assiniboine, it took two years before he was able to get his own children into the daycare.

According to Frison, the province had committed resources toward a daycare expansion back in 2009 that it was anxious to see used.

Adding on to the existing facilities will be a new kitchen, playrooms, storage rooms, laundry rooms and more. The daycare isn’t as close to completion as the meat processing centre, but there are builders actively working on the site.

Another recent addition to the campus is the Public Safety Training Centre. The first part of the centre opened in 2015, with a “force simulation lab” opening last year.

The RCMP and Brandon Police Service both run training in the rooms, which include various props and items to simulate real-world scenarios.

A group of moveable walls allow police to build different scenarios based on different building layouts.

On Thursday, 29 people in a First Nations Safety Officer program were on site receiving a lesson. This class is the 12th that has gone through level one training. Assiniboine has also completed one round of level two testing.

These safety officers are a level below regular police, helping police co-ordinate with Indigenous communities with the authority to carry out certain tasks.

Assiniboine did not know the total cost of these expansions off-hand and a spokesperson told the Sun they are looking into the matter.

The Sun asked a representative from the provincial government whether they have plans to fund future development on the North Hill campus, but a response was not received by press time.

A future development at the Victoria Avenue campus may be the relocation of the adult collegiate, currently located downtown in a leased space. Frison said the college is looking into the feasibility of such a move.

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