A City of Kamloops proposal to borrow up to $275 million to build a performing arts centre and recreation facilities is the largest capital project ever put to residents — but it is by no means the first.
Over the decades, Kamloops has pulled together to build Sandman Centre, the Canada Games Aquatic Centre, the Tournament Capital Centre and facilities on McArthur Island, among others.
In a four-part series beginning on Tuesday, Castanet Kamloops will delve deep into Tournament Capital history.
The series will explore past referendums and the construction process for some centrepiece buildings, the origins of the Tournament Capital of Canada name and the renewed drive for recreation and culture facilities interrupted by the pandemic.
“You look at Kamloops today, what would it be without these facilities? You’ve got to flash back and go, ‘What if we didn’t build them?’ And that is true of any one of our public venues,” said acting CAO Byron McCorkell, who helped guide the city through its last major push to complete sports facility upgrades and new construction in the mid-2000s.
Opposition was there
Despite the current popularity of the facilities, their construction was no easy task — with referendums on borrowing and the projects themselves beset by opposition, fears over the potential impact on taxpayers and skyrocketing construction costs.
McCorkell noted it took multiple referendums for the community to warm to the idea of borrowing to build Sandman Centre. Letters to the editor published in Kamloops This Week in the fall of 1990 capture some of the dissent.
“We subsidize the Blazers and at 2,400 seats, they rarely have a full house. Now we are expected to believe that they need a 5,000-seat arena — for what purpose?” one letter writer said about the proposed arena at Third Avenue and Lorne Street.
“Kamloops has a history of negative response to big projects, and then an overwhelming cheer when they're done, which is, it's just interesting,” McCorkell said. "I think every community experiences the same sort of nail-biter.”
Terry Lake, former Kamloops mayor, said it was “nerve-wracking” to watch referendum votes come in when the community was asked about borrowing up to $37.6 million for sports facility upgrades and new construction — including the TCC.
“A lot of the people at the city and in the city had memories of a failed referendum on a major sports infrastructure spending program,” he said.
“Of course, when the final results came in, we were A, very happy and B, very relieved. And when you think back, if we hadn't done that, our city wouldn't be nearly what it is today.”
At a crossroads
This summer, Kamloops residents have been asked to consider how they want to shape the city’s future.
Through an alternative approval process, the city has asked its voters permission to borrow up to $275 million to build a performing arts centre, an ice arena multiplex, and to fund design work for more facilities laid out in the Build Kamloops program — which has its roots in a groundbreaking recreation master plan published in 2019.
“You look at some of our facilities and they’re really quite incredible, and you look at the support that the citizens have given to having these done — even though the referendum for the TCC just scraped through,” said Ron McColl, former manager of recreation and culture for the City of Kamloops.
“We were using the bunkers for training the throws athletes in Kamloops prior to the TCC. I mean, we were doing the best we could with the facilities we had.”
While the notion of constructing recreation facilities is nothing new for a municipality, perhaps it has taken on special significance for Kamloops — the Tournament Capital of Canada.
“I think that the more that we can support these kinds of passions here, and the more we become a family-friendly city that invites the province and the country every so often to our doorstep, the better we are,” said former Mayor Ken Christian. “I truly believed that while I was mayor, and I still believe it.”
