A week made all the difference.
Niagara-on-the-Lake council voted Tuesday night to undo last week’s decision to delay the Royal George Theatre rebuild, voting 6-3 to approve its official plan and zoning bylaw amendments and directing staff to come up with new planning paperwork ahead of the next council meeting.
This will allow the multi-million-dollar rebuild of the 110-year-old theatre on Queen Street to move forward.
The move comes one week after the town’s Nov. 11 decision to hold off on approving and have staff investigate concerns about the theatre’s size, height, parking and accessibility.
“It was a roller coaster, but we’re very happy with the ultimate result,” said Shaw Festival executive director Tim Jennings, speaking to The Lake Report after the meeting.
In council’s Nov. 11 decision during the committee of the whole meeting, it directed staff to look into several parts of the Royal George Theatre’s rebuild.
One instruction asked staff to see whether the new Royal George could be designed with a maximum floor area of 35,000 square feet — 3,000 less than the Shaw’s planned 38,000-square-foot design, spread out over three floors.
These 38,000 square feet represent the size of the building above-ground, while there would be an additional 15,500 square feet below ground, for a theatre that’s 53,500 square feet large in total.
Following that, in a Nov. 17 submission to the town ahead of its Nov. 18 council meeting, the Shaw warned it could abandon the rebuild — or sell the Queen Street–Victoria Street property — if council did not approve the required planning amendments.
The letter said further delays would add more than $200,000 per month in escalation, contract and financing costs and could prevent the new theatre from opening in fall 2028, “costing main street merchants and hoteliers millions in lost revenues.”
Any reduction below the current 38,000-square-foot design would trigger a full redesign that the Shaw cannot fund after spending more than $4 million on engineering and earlier revisions, the letter said.
“We are a charity. We do not have the capacity to fund a redesign of this project,” it said.
Initially, council voted to keep its Nov. 11 direction in place, until Coun. Tim Balasiuk proposed to reopen the file after a 10-minute break — a reconsideration motion that two-thirds of council supported.
“The reason why I brought this back up is because I just feel like this needs more dialogue,” Balasiuk said in the meeting.
Although council had heard back from the Shaw about what it was prepared to offer, he said he felt staff still needed clearer direction to confirm those commitments and to determine whether the festival was willing to address the rest of council’s requests “at all whatsoever.”
The reconsideration allowed councillors to undo last week’s instructions and replace them with a new set of directions for staff: update the zoning bylaw to include five accessible parking spaces, accept cash-in-lieu for one required parking space, work with the Shaw Festival on a public-washroom agreement and sort out remaining details, such as landscaping, outlined in the festival’s Nov. 16 letter.
These new directions do not include the previous direction about possibly reducing the size of the new theatre.
Council approved the amended motion with those new directions. Couns. Maria Mavridis, Andrew Niven and Sandra O’Connor opposed both reopening the file and the final decision.
“I still have concerns over mass and scale, so I cannot vote in favour of it until it is addressed,” said O’Connor at the meeting.
She said the building would be too imposing on Queen Street and is uncertain about how the municipal heritage committee’s comments on the project would be handled at the site plan stage.
Lord Mayor Gary Zalepa told The Lake Report that he is pleased with council’s decision.
He called the Royal George rebuild a major project for the community and the result of “months and months of work and many dollars spent” on policy, heritage and planning requirements.
“I appreciate council doing that,” Zalepa said. “They put a significant amount of work into doing their homework, asking questions, reviewing all those reports — which, you know, are hundreds and hundreds of pages.”
He said recommendations are never final until council votes and that last week’s committee feedback “led to some changes, which I think are better for the overall project.”
“Now, the next step is we do have to approve the final bylaws, which would implement the official plan amendment and the zoning bylaw amendments,” Zalepa added.
Coun. Gary Burroughs, who voted in favour of approving the rebuild, told The Lake Report he was frustrated with and confused by how council handled the process, especially the procedural limitations on debate and the way motions unfolded during the meeting.
“I know the rules say that you can speak once, but the fact that we couldn’t (speak more) on such a controversial issue was upsetting to me, because I had a lot to say,” said Burroughs. “I was assuming there would be another motion that would put it in a better light.”
“After the break, that’s what Tim Balasiuk and I came up with, which is fine,” he added. “But again, talking about process — it should never have gone there.”
In an emailed statement on Nov. 19, Jennings said the Shaw is “happy to see council’s decision to let us move ahead and respect the town’s commitment to a thorough process regarding the future of our Royal George Theatre project.”
He said the Shaw looks forward to “working with town staff on the next steps” and is “excited to move forward with our plans to build a new Royal George (that) our community, staff and audiences will be proud of for generations to come.”
The rebuild of the Royal George Theatre, which is closing its doors at the end of the year, is expected to cost $75-85 million.
