State of the City: Gateway District Project

The vision making portion of the State of the City Presentation  had the Mayor updating residents on a range of proposed developments for the community.

While Mayor Brain made note of the larger financial limitations that the City faces for all of its infrastructure as part of the event, something we reviewed as part of our Overview of the mayor's presentation.

The night also featured the vision making of the last few years from the Mayor, wth Mr. Brain updating residents as to the progress for many of those elements for what he calls incubation projects.

Mayor Brain's notes on on the area known as the Gateway Project reviewed much of the same themes as when it was introduced in 2019, with some notes on additional items of interest since that time.

"First up is the Gateway Project.  So this is one of our flagship projects in the downtown core. 

This is the area focused, that we're focusing on.  This is the new RCMP Station here with the Jehovah Witness Building, the Credit  Union building, this is the old DQ , this is the bit behind  there, this is the empty Parking lot across from there.

We have an MOU with all the property owners here to jointly develop this whole intersection. 

We're working with Highways, we're working with BC Housing and what the idea to do with this site is to build a mixed used site, that has residential, commercial and  community amenity associated to it.

So, the future of downtown's is not retail. The future with downtown's for small communities like ours is experiences. 

So that's what we need to focus on now you go downtown to do something, to bring community together, to gather people and then the retail shops around that will be more successful.

The twentieth century was all about let's just build a big line of stores and hopefully people show up. Well online shopping, all that kind of stuff, we have AI automation, all those things are disrupting and we're just not going to be able to compete with that.

So the future is experiences. Gateway project is all about having people living in this area, working in the area and then being able to play in this area.

And so we've been working with with developers from the Urban Development Institute, we've been doing  presentations we've been bringing people up here and we are working with the Credit Union.

And just a caveat, the Credit Union is doing their own project, they're working on their own building, but collaborating with us on this project. And if we can't get a developer in time, well they're going to go ahead and do their own thing and build their own building.

So Credit Union is independent  but they are through the MOU,  working with us to help jointly develop this. We have six interested parties in the community that are willing to take a look at this site. But this is going to be a bigger challenge.

One of the key recommendations from the 2030 plan was to develop this intersection, if this happens it begins the spurring of the development market in Prince Rupert. But what we have to do to get it going is we need  partners to come in to de-risk the project.

So you need people to invest you know five million, ten million, another three million and everyone comes together to help bring the cost of the project down. Economies of scale, get something built, so that we can prove Rupert's a place that developers can come and build.

That's the idea with Gateway and this project is still moving forward. We're retooling and we're going to put another RFP out for interested parties, based on some new transfers of land  that have happened here. 

This is a very exciting area, this is going to be the new downtown for the community"

The Gateway Project portion of the presentation can be viewed from the City's Video replay of the Sate of the City Presentation.

The review of the Gateway Project in the community starts at the  one hour mark

Some of our past items of note to the theme have been included as part of our Vision Tracker archive, as well as our Council Discusison archive

With the Vision themes coming out of the 2030 Vision plan, you can go back and review notes from that presentation from 2019 here.

Our Full overview of the State of the City Presentation can be reviewed here.

We also have created an archive of the elements from it, that compilation is available here.

( some of the above images come from screenshots of the video presentation)