City needs to keep Bowman Building as a community hub
By Lethbridge Herald on May 18, 2022.
Editor:
On behalf of the Lethbridge Historical Society (LHS), I am writing to you today regarding the potential sale of the Bowman Building by the City. Our society has a deep connection to that building which started in the mid-1960s before the Allied Arts Council occupation. It is where the Lethbridge Historical Society started the Civic Museum, which eventually became the Galt Museum.
The Bowman is one of the early buildings to receive provincial heritage designation. Additionally, the Joliffe Academy of Dancing, the Lethbridge Sketch Club, Oldman River Potters’ Guild, Lethbridge Camera Club, Lethbridge Handicraft Guild and Playgoers of Lethbridge were all housed there during the years that the Allied Arts Council used the space. Most recently, the BLAST program found a home in the Bowman.
After Casa opened in 2013, the City invested money into the Bowman with the idea to use it as a place for non-profit organizations that needed a physical space.
As then City of Lethbridge Rec and Culture Manager, Ashley Matthews, stated, “…It is [the Bowman] an important building to our community, and that’s why we are putting money in to preserve it. It is going to continue to provide a service for non-profit organizations.” (Lethbridge Herald, May 14, 2012)
It is our understanding the City still uses the “Community Service” indirect delivery operational model. This operating model allows community organizations to deliver program opportunities to our community with the direct support of the City.
Nevermore is this needed than now! The critical role not for profits plays in our community should be remembered!
Not-for-profit groups step in and volunteer to help ensure we can have limited government. We need them in our community.
Vibrant and diverse not-for-profits provide various programs and services that help attract people to and retain people in the City.
If these groups disappear, would that mean that the City would have to step in and cover the costs of the services these groups are providing?
The Bowman has a long history of serving the City of Lethbridge in many community and cultural capacities.
The City should continue this legacy. Developing a building such as Bowman into a hub for not-for-profit groups has had great success in many other communities. They can work together and find efficiencies if they are in one place.
The Indigenous Resource Hub for providing resources to other organizations to help them better work with the Blackfoot is only one use. Many other service organizations could use this historic building before the City should consider divestment of the property!
The Lethbridge Historical Society understands the fiduciary responsibility the mayor and city councilors have to the citizenry, and the divestiture of excess or underused city-owned property is necessary.
However, city council has supported businesses throughout the pandemic, but many not for profits also need support.
Doing so by providing them with a space like the Bowman, would help ensure a strong economy and a strong community coming out of the pandemic.
We implore Mayor Hyggen and city council to reconsider the potential sale of the Bowman Building and keep the previous council’s promise to use it as a community hub and a way to support Lethbridge’s diverse citizenry.
Bobbie Fox
Secretary, Lethbridge Historical Society
20-19
Time to put an end to hang-outs and shoot up centers in all areas of downtown. Including the public library.
Yes, without a place to commune and stay warm and dry all those miscreants will have to give up their addictions and voluntary mental health problems and maybe start a tech company or become hedge fund managers.
I don’t understand how a person who includes the word ‘miscreants’ in their vocabulary would think that any person who suffers from a mental illness does so voluntarily.
Yes, the notion that mental illness, or a mental-health problem for that matter, is ‘voluntary’ is a really, really goofy idea. And to quote the great but under-appreciated philosophical oracle, Mr. Ed Grimley, the idea is not just goofy, but it’s ‘mental’, don’t you know?
you just don’t know fes. her scurrilous ways go well beyond believing that mental health issues are voluntary. did you know she also supports jonathan swift’s premise, documented in his “a modest proposal”? indeed, eating babies is a delicious idea.
Mental health problems are voluntary???? That’s just wrong. Have you ever asked someone dealing with poor mental health if its a voluntary condition? If its a place they want to be? I doubt it. What I do know, is that willful ignorance is voluntary.
the responses to your entry are dismal. is it truly possible that people can entirely miss the point that is so very well underscored by the use of satire?
To City Hall Officials
Please…. Do not sell off this building. Continue to utilize it as a community hub and a way to support Lethbridge’s diverse citizenry for positive purpose for all; for generations to come.
What positive could possibly come from this??? Get your head out of the sand!
The Lethbridge Historical Society, with Councillor Belinda Crowson as the President, right?
You did have me until you stated “…The Indigenous Resource Hub for providing resources to other organizations to help them better work with the Blackfoot is only one use…” then I recognized where you were going with this and the agenda Councillor Crowson is pushing to further destroy our downtown by attracting even more addicts downtown in an area already plagued with crime, property damage/vandalism/graffiti, prostitution where John’s even pick up the prostitutes in the Public Library parking lot, open drug use, public urination/defecation and other negative effects.
You want to turn downtown into the Southern Alberta version of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside slum that attracts addicts from across the country!
The Lethbridge Historical Society twisted my families history in this city that stood long, passed from member to member with just one statement from someone, disregarding all of the other facts stated and supported, so I have zero faith in you society and in you suggestion to use this beautiful building for an Indigenous Resource Hub!
That and the Alpha House Shelter should be moved to Kipp on the Kainai Lands acquired there, only 10 minutes from downtown, taking all the crime/druggies it has attracted and getting out of our city!
You may be Crowson’s secretary for the society, but Crowson has voiced the same views and it appears that we are still seeing some of the issues with re-electing some of the old Council that allowed the SCS in this city and our city to be over-run by addicts. They all need to be removed from Council so we can take our city, our streets, our parks and neighbourhoods back!
Citizens will never allow the Bowman to be taken over for an Indigenous Resource Hub!
The Public Library across the street is a hot-bed for addicts and prostitutes and many parents will not allow their children to go it the ‘downtown’ library for that reason! Prostitutes hanging out in the bathrooms and doing drugs and John’s picking them up in the parking lot as witnessed yesterday and the bus terminal across the street, that the city is blind to the fact and wonder why no one is using their parkade that sits mostly empty after being available for a few years now. You just can’t explain to them that people will not use that facility because they do not want to have to walk through a group of addicts, who intimidate them, to get to their vehicles, not knowing just how safe their vehicles are going to be with all the addicts/homeless hanging out there and multiple calls there for overdoses!
City administrators hear what they want to hear! Many of them should have been removed with the last Council as well!
The Historical Society should stay in their lane and focus on accurated histroy of this city, something they failed in our families case and just not worth trying to resolve after many efforts!
Driving through downtown this morning, I witnessed 5 or 6 natives permanently camped out in the bus shelter in front of the library, with all of their paraphernalia, shopping carts, sleeping bags, etc.
Pouring rain, and an elderly white man having to stand outside in the rain to wait for the bus.
Something wrong with this picture…..
Where are the police? Surely it’s unlawful to move into a public bus shelter and occupy it long term, the result being no one else can use it?
I know they hate the white people, but really?
yes, when a white (transparent? person of non-colour) is getting wet while persons of colour get to stay dry, well, that is just another example of a world gone wrong. could the people of colour not be decent enough to help educate the person of non-colour as to how an umbrella works?
oh, and i was in costco the other day, and witnessed some natives buying some nice things and good food, and using a credit card. meanwhile, i had earlier witnessed some people of non-colour hanging out and drinking in a park.
The Historical Society is meddling! You do not get to determine what a building is used for, just that it is preserved. So beyond preservation, which a sale can also accommodate, your bias opinion on usage is neither wanted or sought.
Your interpretation of exactly what nonprofits do is also personal opinion and does not represent anything but your opinion. To promote nonprofits is also not your job! Nor is it your job to consider nonprofits only, when providing social services.
You do not consider the implications on the Blackfoot people and appear to want to destroy the downtown and its taxpayers to further an agenda that all nonprofits have in this city. Time to broaden your horizons Bobbie Fox! If you are part of preservation you are on the wrong side of Preserving our City!
Your job is historical preservation not downtown destruction. I cannot get over the number of people who believe installing everything downtown will somehow create a “feelgood” feeling between Blackfoot Confederacy and Lethbridge. Neither the Blackfoot want it, nor do the taxpayers. The only Blackfeet that want everything in Lethbridge are those that live in Lethbridge already! They see this as a job opportunity, above all else!
So your promotion is riddled with bias to the “doing God’s work” nonprofits who are intent on destroying any chance we have of reconciliation and downtown preservation!