BU scraps downtown plans

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This article was published 05/05/2021 (1586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A 6,500-square-metre section of Brandon’s downtown core will remain vacant a little while longer as Brandon University revealed recently its plans to establish a secondary campus at this site have been shelved.

This announcement was made on Monday in conjunction with the City of Brandon and the Brandon Downtown Development Corporation, two groups that have been working with BU to make this downtown campus a reality since 2014.

The city and the BDDC first started working on this site roughly a decade ago, looking to establish a major mixed-use development project that brings people downtown to live, work and enjoy leisure time.

BU took a leading role in this development in 2014 and had gotten to the point of undertaking a public engagement process and finalizing a feasibility study.

By January 2019, the Sun reported that BU was in the process of selecting developers for the downtown project.

Talking to the Sun on Tuesday, BU vice-president of administration and finance Scott Lamont said that the university was hoping to set up some modern student housing and maybe even a medium-sized theatre at this spot, with the aim of injecting some new life into Brandon’s downtown.

“A population of university students and professors and programs is likely to bring a younger demographic to the downtown, which tends to lend itself to more nightlife and restaurants and that sort of thing,” Lamont told the Sun on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, all three parties recently decided to scrap plans to establish a downtown campus after they couldn’t secure a private-sector lead to develop the site.

“The amount of time that it has taken may well have been part of the problem,” Lamont said.

“Once you get into the COVID situation, and depending on what other resources and enterprises (these developers) might have been involved with, it might as well have been just one more thing that was an uncertainty at this stage of the game.”

Lamont went on to say that BU won’t be pursuing campus expansion elsewhere in the community at this current time.

Instead, university officials will be focusing their energy on renovating long-standing structures located on their main campus, like the John R. Brodie Science Centre.

“It was built in the late ’60s and the bones of the building are good, but the infrastructure inside of it … not so much,” Lamont said.

“For the university (members) working on investments, I think that’s the far higher priority than establishing a second campus.”

Meanwhile, all lands currently owned by BU as part of the downtown development site — which is located north of Princess Avenue and between 10th Street and Ninth Street — will be transferred to the BDDC and the city.

According to Monday’s news release, a new procurement process will be initiated in late fall or early winter of 2021 to gauge private-sector interest in developing the site under an updated scope.

Despite this setback, Ryan Nickel, the city’s director of planning and building, remains optimistic about the future of this site, since all three partners are still committed to finding a private-sector lead to spearhead a transformational project downtown.

“We are still working together,” he said. “It’s a little bit disappointing that we weren’t able to bring something forward here, but downtown revitalization never stops.”

Outside of BU’s main campus, the university also runs a small satellite campus out of Winnipeg that houses a psychiatric nursing program.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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