Editor:
Re: “Sechelt mayor pans chamber scheme,” Jan. 29.
As a person who has been involved in designing buildings and planning all my working life, and having travelled extensively around the world, I agree wholeheartedly with the mayor, that the Dusty Road site is not the place for a new municipal hall.
In the majority of communities, city hall is the hub of activity and a symbol of the town or city in which it stands. Municipal halls should be easily accessible (on foot) as well as being prominent architecturally. They traditionally have a square, or open space beside them for public functions and large gatherings.
The Sechelt Library has been looking for funding for expansion for some time, so who will pay for that? It would be sensible to let them have the existing municipal facility and update it to their needs and relocate the municipal hall to a prominent location in town. I would suggest the corner currently occupied by the Shell gas station and immediate properties, as being ideal. Gas stations can go almost anywhere.
With regard to financing such a project, I submitted both a design and proposal for funding such a project some four years ago, to the previous mayor, with the advice that then was the time to start researching funding possibilities and accumulating capital to build a new hall. Nothing was done about that!
Ralph Meyer, Sechelt
