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Investor walks away from boatyard proposal

Company president points to competing interests in south harbour
Investor walks away from boatyard proposal

by Laura Walz editor@prpeak.com An investor who was backing a proposal for a boatyard in Powell River’s new south harbour has walked away from the project.

Colin Jackson, president of Cooper Boating, said the investor changed his mind after going on a tour of Powell River’s new waterfront development projects. “The challenge is it’s clear there are lots of people with lots of ideas of what should be in the various places of the different marinas,” said Jackson.

Cooper Boating operates the largest recreational charter fleet in Canada. Its locations include Granville Island’s Maritime Market in Vancouver and the Port Sidney Marina in Sidney, BC. It has a satellite location in Powell River that is open seasonally.

The company manages about $18 million worth of boats, Jackson said, and the biggest growth area for the future is out of Powell River. While the area has many of the necessary ingredients to run a successful rental business, including a fuel dock, grocery stores and restaurants, there is no way to lift a boat, Jackson added. “It’s a pretty painful experience to try and run a rental boat business without an ability to lift boats,” he said. “It’s pretty hard for the boating segment in Powell River to grow at all without a lift.”

The company had offered to relocate all of its maintenance work to Powell River, Jackson said. “We’d love to make that our biggest operation. It’s always been the smallest because there’s no way to grow. If you’re looking from a million miles up and say, why can’t boating grow in Powell River, it really comes back to a proper way to lift big boats. There’s a boat ramp there, but our boats get up to 60 feet long and [there’s] no way to get them out of the water.”

The investor is from Calgary and flew out three times specifically for this project, Jackson said. “Everyone seemed to encourage us to put a plan together so we put the basic engineering work together and flew up two weeks in a row to talk to everybody.”

The investor is concerned that the “competing interests for what to do with the harbour are going to end up where there’s just not enough space at the end of the day to make a viable operation,” Jackson said.

During the tour, City of Powell River staff indicated they were looking at relocating working boats, now berthed in the older part of the south harbour, to the newer section. There’s also a dilemma about how to connect the north and south part of the harbour. The seawalk doesn’t go all the way through and people who dock in the new part of the harbour would have to walk on the highway to reach any amenities.

Still, Jackson said he is grateful that city representatives have worked with his company as much as they have. “There’s a bit of an irony,” he said. “Because everyone is being so accommodating, it comes off as a lack of leadership and direction as to what is going to go on there.”

Councillor Chris McNaughton, chair of the city’s Westview Waterfront Development Committee, said one of the reasons for the tour was to provide an overview of the waterfront projects. He said the fact that there were competing interests “was the nature of the business,” but added he was disappointed that the investor has walked.

Now that the projects have been completed, McNaughton said he thinks the city should issue a request for proposals. “That would be really the next step, to get an indication from the private sector what interest there is and what the private sector is prepared to invest in,” he said. “We can bring those opportunities to the public. If we start the other way around, I think it’s backwards.”

McNaughton also said it would be ill-advised to replicate the kinds of services that already exist in a struggling market, when there might be an opportunity to bring jobs and new economic activity to the community. “Business in Powell River is struggling,” he said. “If we bring in new economic opportunities, then I think that will help to build new infrastructure, especially on the waterfront.”