By Laurie Watt
 

Two arts community activists are giving city council a bad review for the cliffhanger ending to the large-theatre debate.

Councillors put off making a final decision on whether to spend approximately $100,000 on a feasibility study for an 1,800-seat performing arts centre; supporters and detractors alike banded together to decide when council begins work on its 2009 budget.

Longtime theatre advocate and Colours of Music festival founder Bruce Owen told council the city doesn’t need another study; the city has spent enough on studies throughout the past decade.

“We don’t need to spend more money on whether the theatre would have the population to support it; it’s already been done,” he said, citing a 2001 city-funded study that said either a 1,200-seat or an 1,800-seat theatre would be viable.

Since then, Casino Rama’s entertainment centre has opened – and Owen said that wouldn’t take away any business. “Rama caters to a very narrow audience. Rama could not and would not present what we would in Barrie.”

He went on to say the theatre could host a variety of musical and theatrical events – including Celtic, country and western, gospel and jazz, as well as comedians, musicals and dance presentations.

“Barrie is the shopping centre for this region of Ontario, the educational centre, the judicial centre, the financial centre, the medical centre. Barrie should be the cultural centre. With a large theatre, it would be,” he told council just before it adjourned its second meeting this week.

Steven Fielder, the Barrie Music Festival’s executive director, said a large theatre and the productions it would attract are invaluable in educating today’s young talent – as well as giving them reason to return when they are adults.

“There are thousands of young people studying music and the performing arts. They need a centre where they can see world-class performances; that is the only way they can really learn,” he said.

“They won’t go away and stay away. They will come back and be part of it.”

Council, however, stuck to its plan to decide at budget time. As for the finale, Coun. John Brassard’s comments could foreshadow that.

“We’re potentially putting ourselves on a path to construction in the early part of the next decade (with a feasibility study). We will still be paying for decisions now. I look at growth-related issues and crumbling infrastructure,” he said, citing a $150-million surface water treatment plant and an $80-million upgrade to the sewage treatment plant.

“We’re making some unbelievably significant investments and I’m not comfortable heading down this path.”

A feasibility study approved in next year’s budget planning would take approximately eight months to conduct – with a report to council in early 2010 – an election year.