The Athabasca Heritage Society is looking for a solution to their issue with Home Hardware using their parking lot as a storage area.
Members of the society went to the Athabasca town council meeting last Tuesday to ask council’s opinion on the creation of a lease to use the parking lot, as according to them, signage isn’t working.
“The day that we put the signage up on the fence between the construction site and the property, Home Hardware unloaded a bunch of property and then just filled up the parking area,” said Margaret Anderson, the chair of the heritage society.
Anderson’s thought was that with a lease agreement, there would be specific details on what the area is to be used for and where the parking needs to be.
The proposed lease would be year-to-year because, eventually, the society wants to landscape and put in a park when the parking lot currently is.
“The objective in the long term is to redevelop the whole property, to landscape it, to put in features at the back with the thought in mind of perhaps having an eventual permanent visitor information centre there, but of course, that’s up to Athabasca County,” she said.
The society currently has a verbal agreement with Home Hardware – allowing it to use the space, while the society receives 10 per cent off construction materials in return – but, with the continued upgrading, this will be impossible to continue.
“That was okay for a few years, but I agree with you, it’s really ugly and the property will be a bit of a construction site, not this summer, I think next summer,” said Anderson.
“We (are going to) take the addition off the back of the train station and expose the old facade, so there will be a season where we’re under construction outside too, and we will have to have them off the property because then it becomes a issue of occupational health and safety.”
Most of the council agreed that there should be something done.
“I’m probably the one that’s the most concerned about this because I have brought it up before,” said councillor Shelly Gurba.
“My biggest concern with allowing Home Hardware to put their stuff there is, it becomes an eyesore and every timea I’ve driven by it, it irks me to see all that stuff there and it’s not in a tidy manner or anything necessarily.”
Councillor Nicole Adams added the store should be the one to looking into a solution.
“If Home Hardware is outgrowing their site and they need to lease adjacent spaces, that’s a problem that they need to look into in the longer term,” she stated.
