The City of Cranbrook has seen record-breaking construction, the completion of a number of projects and the launch of others, leading Mayor Lee Pratt to call the year a success, despite COVID-19.
Pratt said the pandemic has posed its challenges on the community, but the City did a decent job of handling the situation.
“It was a very busy year for the city on a number of fronts. Once COVID hit with a vengeance late on in the spring, it changed a lot of our plans and operations, but all in all, considering what happened, I think 2020 was a positive year for the city,” said Pratt.
One of the major issues which Pratt feels the City has made progress on was housing, as a 39-unit development along Hurry Avenue will soon welcome residents, construction on a 292-unit complex along Innes Avenue has begun, along with several other projects have started throughout the year.
“Housing has been something we’ve been looking at really seriously for four years because of the vacancy rate in Cranbrook. We have a number of projects we finally got done, and there’s a number of them on the drawing board,” said Pratt.
Mayor Pratt spoke about the record amount of development that went into the community throughout the year. The official results have yet to be published, but Pratt says the City has seen a record-breaking high for building permits.
“Our building permit numbers, we haven’t gotten the official numbers in yet, but it’s in excess of $90-million, which is an absolutely phenomenal number and an all-time record,” said Pratt. “With that, it created a lot of jobs, the other side of that is that it’s a lot of dollars spent in the community on equipment and supplies and materials. Those dollars circulate into the overall economy of the city and its businesses. It’s helped to support and feed a lot of families.”
More: Cranbrook Council Approves Bylaws for Innes Avenue Development (Feb 20, 2020)
More: Four-storey affordable housing redevelopment gets Cranbrook Council approval (Oct 27, 2020
More: 20 affordable housing units to be built in Cranbrook (Dec 11, 2020)
Cranbrook has also attempted to perform a deer cull in 2020, to try managing the urban deer population in and around the community. However, the City’s efforts were hampered by theft and vandalism to the taps.
This year, Cranbrook was allowed to cull 70 deer, but only managed to kill eight over 12 weeks due to sabotage and theft. After that, the City decided to let the province deal with the issue.
“The last few years we’ve tried a deer cull, it hasn’t been successful mostly because of vandalism of the traps. This year we elected that we’re going to put it all back on the province, and they’re coming up with some dialogue now and some possible issues that they’ll address with that, but the City is not doing a deer cull,” explained Pratt.
More: Cranbrook Council pushing Province to better handle urban deer populations (Sept 16, 2020)
More: Marred by Theft and Vandalism, Cranbrook Wraps Up Deer Cull Program (Feb 26, 2020)
After the City bought the former Tembec lands along Theatre Road in 2018 for $3-million, it was sold in November of this year for $6-million to Peak Renewables.
The sale was made after Cranbrook has a change of plans regarding what to do with the land.
“The idea there was that we were going to develop it and bring more opportunity and jobs to Cranbrook. When we were looking at the infrastructure, we had plans to do that in 2020, but when COVID hit, we were quite uncertain what our revenue streams were going to be and what our taxes were going to be. We made the decision we would sell it and let someone develop it. With COVID and all of that, the City really didn’t have the resources to do it ourselves,” Pratt said to MyEastKootenayNow.com.
More: City of Cranbrook sells former Tembec lands for $6-million (Nov. 19, 2020)
Despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Pratt said he is optimistic for next year after seeing what the community did in 2020.
“We’ve attracted a lot of attention from developers and outside interest. With people wanting to move to Cranbrook, and more jobs and housing for the employees, next year is going to be pretty exciting, I think,” said Pratt.