The NPA would give the Vancouver Art Gallery free rein over the entire block of land at 688 Cambie Street for a new gallery, mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton announced today. The NPA would also create two endowment funds for cultural infrastructure through community amenity contributions from developers, and develop a strategic plan for growth in Vancouver’s arts, tourism, and entertainment sectors, she said.

“We are going to give this entire site to the art gallery so that it can avail itself of the proceeds of development at this site to fund both the capital of the gallery and an operating endowment for the gallery,” said Anton, speaking on the site of the parking lot the gallery has earmarked as its preferred new home. “My proposal is to give the gallery the entire site, let them develop it to its maximum potential,” she continued.

“That could be a difference of $100 million, $200 million. It’s a very, very significant difference. That can go to fund both the capital and to fund an operating endowment for the gallery. Because the gallery has to have an operating endowment or it will fail—I shouldn’t say that—to make it really sustainable, so it can support its own collections.”

Last February, council voted to reserve two-thirds of the three-acre lot for cultural use, for up to two years, and work with the gallery on developing a strategy for its potential relocation there. The remaining acre on the site is earmarked for office towers and would be used to help pay off the $40 million encumbrance on the site.

NPA council candidate Sean Bickerton—who, along with NPA council candidates Elizabeth Ball and George Affleck, joined Anton—added: “We had two police cars burnt right over here during our recent riot. This park has had an extraordinary history but it has devolved from a marshalling ground and a sports field, to a bus depot and now a parking lot. And to see a site of that, where those police cars were burned, converted into one of the leading cultural institutions of the city for all of us, I think, is just extraordinarily exciting.”

Anton said developers would provide a reliable source of funding to build up cultural endowment funds. The NPA plan is to create an Infrastructure Financing Fund for capital improvements, and an Infrastructure Endowment Fund for operating costs.

“I’m proposing to take a steady stream of that [community amenity contribution] funding and put it into a capital fund for capital projects for the arts around the city,” she explained. “And the art gallery won’t need the funding, but the Museum of Vancouver, for example, the Maritime Museum…they’ve been abandoned by the city. I’m proposing a steady stream of capital for those facilities that will allow us to develop a capital infrastructure.”

Elizabeth Ball said the NPA would develop a cultural tourism strategy that would go over and above the strategy developed by cultural services staff at the city that was approved by council in 2008 as part of its 10-year cultural plan.

“There is not a master tourism strategy which involves tourism and all the infrastructure you need to move forward,” she said. “We know that all the tourism agencies do wonderful work, but it would be wonderful to bring everything together and to move forward to 2020.…the cultural tourism strategy will be a blueprint to expand our tourism industry, cultural infrastructure, organizations, facilities, services, festivals, museums and marketing.”