Curatorial centre expansion postponed

Two-year delay will help region financially, allow for more planning

WATERLOO REGION — Expansion of Waterloo Region’s curatorial centre has been put on hold for two years.

The project was scheduled to start this year, but staff presented a recommendation to defer expansion of artifact storage until 2019 to a regional committee on Tuesday.

“We needed to revisit the plan, revisit the numbers,” said Adèle Hempel, manager and curator of Region of Waterloo Museums.

Last September, regional council provided prebudget approval of $11.15 million for the capital project in order to apply for a grant from the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund. The region applied for $4 million, about one-third of the total project cost.

Ottawa approved $1 million for the expansion project, slated to start this year and end in 2019. Proceeding would have meant the region would add $10.15 million in new debt over that period, raising concerns about the timing.

Putting it on hold a couple years would bring the region closer to the retirement of existing cultural site debt. By the end of 2021, there will be $2.4 million in savings in the museum operating budget.

The region also got approval to defer the federal funding to the new construction period of 20192021.

“It was necessary and it’s going to help us financially,” Hempel said of the revised plan.

It also gives museum staff extra time to plan for the expansion, including protecting the current collection and moving into the new space.

“It’s a huge undertaking,” Hempel said. “We’ve got to do a lot of careful planning.”

Artifact storage is in short supply, she said.

Storage at Schneider Haus now exceeds capacity and the curatorial centre is at 90 per cent capacity. The expansion design will increase storage space by nearly 48 per cent from 20,828 to 30,731 square feet, accommodating collections growth for the next 25 to 30 years.

“We have to turn it away if we don’t have space to store it properly,” Hempel said.

The collections are not static. People regularly approach the museum with potential donations, which accounts for the bulk of new acquisitions.

“We collect all the time,” said Hempel, adding that region engages in purposeful collecting to avoid duplicates and it aims for a representative collection of the region and its cultural heritage.

The project’s cost has been updated from the original estimate of $11.15 million to $11.83 million.

The region’s museums care for more than 53,000 objects, plus an estimated million archeological objects.

Major upgrades have been undertaken to the museum sites twice; in the 1980s when storage was added to Joseph Schneider Haus, and in 1995 when the curatorial centre was opened at the Waterloo Region Museum campus, formerly Doon Heritage Crossroads.

The deferral plan will need final approval of regional council.