Penmar disaster

The Penmar Society certainly had a neat idea, turning an old movie theatre into a small, performing arts centre and repetoire movie theatre. The intentions were god. This newspaper, in fact, supported the idea. Boy were we wrong — and so was Penticton’s city council.

The only difference is, we’re not out $63,000 and the taxpayers of Penticton are.

The city does become the proud owners of several hundred theatre seats plus two projectors.

At Tuesday’s council meeting you would have thought they had just won the lottery. Nobody — until questioned by the media — dared mention it was a terrible investment by the City.

If they’re lucky they will get 10 cents on the dollar, nowhere near the initial investment of $63,000 that the city coughed up for what was an unrealistic project.

London, Ont., the 10th largest city in Canada with a large university and community college couldn’t support a repetoire theatre. (It briefly became a porno movie theatre before sitting idle.)

Penticton Coun. Judy Sentes and chief administrative officer Peter Weeber both admitted during question period that supporting artistic ventures can be risky.

Sentes used examples of The Shatford Centre, Rotary Ribfest and Oktoberfest as projects the city supported which paid positive dividends. Indeed they have.

The idea was the dream of Kerri Milton, former general manager of the old Penmar Theatre who in her role as executive director of the Downtown Penticton Association was also a supporter of the light canopy for the 100 block of Main Street.

She certainly had the ear of mayor and council.

In fairness, the Penmar project was approved when Garry Litke was mayor and only Sentes, Helena Konanz and Andrew Jakubeit were on that council.

The project should never have been given the green light without some form of guarantee that if the loan was forfeitted that there would be other methods of collecting (whether that meant executive members guaranteeing the loan.)

The bottom line is three members of the present council made a very poor decision with taxpayer money — $63,000 to be precise, more than most Penticton residents make in a year.

Weeber is promising stricter regulations in the future for groups requesting loans to assure this doesn’t happen again.

Let’s hope it doesn’t.

City will be out $63,000 as it had no guarantees

—James Miller