Museum seeks funding from city for repairs

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This article was published 20/12/2022 (1108 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum has asked the City of Brandon for help fixing the aging hangar that houses its exhibits.

The museum is a successful one, executive director Stephen Hayter told city council — one of a kind in Canada — but assistance is needed to continue that success.

“Together, we can ensure that the museum will continue to be a major attraction for Brandon into the future,” Hayter said in a presentation to council during its regular meeting Monday evening.

Hangar No. 1, which is about 80 years old and houses the museum’s vintage aircraft and other exhibits, has been closed since early November after damage to trusses that support the roof was discovered, putting the roof at risk of collapse.

During Monday evening’s regular council meeting, Hayter formally asked the city to provide as much as it can toward the emergency repair of the hangar, now expected to cost nearly $198,000. Hayter noted the original estimate for the emergency repair of $171,000 was revised last week after it was learned that an additional truss needed to be reinforced.

The museum is also asking the city to partner with it to partially fund ongoing maintenance and repair of the hangar. The museum would fundraise or secure grants from other levels of government that the city would match for specific projects. Otherwise, Hayter said, the museum’s redevelopment funds would be drained and other improvements might have to be postponed.

Barring that, Hayter said the museum would like the city to equally share the cost of the emergency repair.

“The greater the city support is, the more money the museum retains as matching funds for leverage to access grants for the permanent hangar repair,” he said.

The museum is one of only seven Manitoba signature museums and listed as Brandon’s top attraction on TripAdvisor. It contains 40,000 artifacts and one of Canada’s largest Second World War aircraft collections, and draws up to 28,000 visitors per year, Hayter said.

The museum has invested nearly $3 million into preserving its collection and making capital improvements, he added. Those improvements have included a new memorial wall, hangar restoration and the preservation of other historic buildings.

The hangar itself has received care and repair over the years. In 1985, the city installed an exterior metal truss to support the heavy hangar doors.

In 2000, the museum received a $500,000 provincial grant that allowed it to inspect and fix the hangars, trusses and replace the original roof. However, Hayter said at that time there wasn’t enough money to restore the door truss that was supported by the exterior truss and deemed stable.

On Nov. 4, he said, engineers informed the museum that a number of the repaired trusses had failed due to strain that the exterior door truss was putting on the rest of the building.

The emergency shoring of trusses should ease that strain, Hayter said, and so far the snowfall Brandon has received hasn’t added significant weight.

“The nice thing about the shoring, it provides us with a two-year window to do the repair,” Hayter said. “And that’s coming from our engineer suggesting that you wouldn’t want to wait much longer than that with emergency shoring because it is just a temporary structure.”

When asked by Coun. Shaun Cameron (Ward 4) if the temporary shoring would allow patrons to enter the building, Hayter said that’s not yet known. If it does allow visitors to return, Hayter said, it likely wouldn’t be until March.

The museum is also pursuing provincial and federal funding.

At the conclusion of Hayter’s presentation, council referred the museum’s requests to the 2023 budget deliberations.

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