Controversy and opposition on the relocation and sale of the Museum of the Cariboo Chilcotin continues on social media.
Mayor of Williams Lake, Walt Cobb says although he does not follow facebook a lot of the information he has been hearing is inaccurate.
“One of the first things I heard is that nobody knew about this-well the Museum Board knew about this. We had been talking about this since last October so there has been a fair amount of discussion. And one of the concerns that we’ve all had is the time frame that we’re dealing with to get the Museum moved.”
Cobb says as of Thursday morning he had received an email from a company that specializes in museum movings, and are coming up to assess it. He says that they are very confident that the timeframe is not an issue.
The sale of the Museum was approved for $350,000 Tuesday night by Council to inSite Housing, Hospitality, and Health Services to develop a 72 care bed facility.
“We had an appraisal on it and it varied anywhere from $200,000 up for different reasons. They made us an offer, we counter offered, and they accepted our counter offer. It’s a fair price considering the fact it’s either going to have to be demolished depending on how they (InSite) deal with the community living portion of the care facility or it’s going have to be totally renovated,” says Cobb adding that some discussion on constructing a new museum has already started.
“The long-range plan would be to put the 153 Mile Store, the Museum, and whatever else in the same location so it would be all tied together. It would probably take a couple of years to get that all finalized. At this time it’s intended the Tourism Discovery Centre will be a temporary location for the Museum so they can be up and operational because we don’t want to close the Museum.”
The Museum will be holding an emergency meeting tonight for membership to further discuss the matter.
“We had a meeting with the Board to let them once again know how we got to this stage because some of the Board members are new that weren’t part of the original discussion so that is where some of the misinformation is happening from. So we went last week and they felt they should have a membership meeting,” says Cobb.
“So the meeting tonight (Thursday) is just for members only just to bring them up to speed so we can stop some of this information that’s out there.