The design of New Westminster's future civic centre may need a bit of fine-tuning but it's nearly complete.
The project has reached the point where the interior programming elements have been determined and the exterior design has been approved.
"From a real functional perspective, it is set. Now we have a really good idea how the building looks and how it relates to the street," said Lisa Spitale, the city's director of development services. "Now it is about tweaking and refining."
Currently, excavation work is taking place at the site in the 700-block of Columbia Street.
"We are on time there," Spitale said. "While we are doing that excavation, it is good to step back a bit and look at it."
After touring buildings constructed from various materials being considered for the civic centre, city council has agreed that the facility will be made predominantly of limestone and will have some black brick. The interior will feature a variety of woods on walls, stairs and soffits.
The City of New Westminster has part-nered with the Uptown Property Group to build an office tower on top of the civic centre. The city's restaurant and civic facility will be about 92,000 square feet and the office tower will be about 130,000 square feet.
While there may still be some tweaking to the final design, Spitale is confident that the civic centre will fit into the Columbia Street historic area. She said the goals have been to respect the area's heritage, to avoid "false historicism" and to ensure the building is easily identifiable as a civic/cultural building.
The city's portion of the civic centre, which will be located on Columbia Street between Eighth and Begbie streets, will include a theatre, convention space, art studios, an art gallery, tourist information centre, the city's museum and archives, the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame and a restaurant. The Uptown Property Group will build an office tower of up to eight storeys above the civic centre.
The City of New Westminster negotiated $35 million in gaming funds to build the multi-use civic facility in downtown New Westminster. The contract stipulates that the facility must be built by December 2013.
