One Castlegar business closing its doors; three more to open
By Kyra Hoggan
It’s a busy summer for business in Castlegar, as a major movie-rental store closes its doors and three new facilities are slated for ground-breaking in the next month.
The Movie Gallery in the Safeway Plaza on Columbia Avenue is one of 181 stores being closed across Canada due to credit issues now facing the U.S. parent company. Castlegar’s Movie Gallery has already stopped renting merchandise, and is instead selling as much of its inventory as possible before closing its doors permanently, on or before July 31.
But the local business landscape is hardly bleak – construction has already begun on City Furniture’s three-storey, 1,504-square-metre facility at 1919 Columbia Avenue (near the Highway 3 overpass). The building will include a basement, main floor and mezzanine.
Meanwhile city council, at its regular meeting Monday night, gave the green light for a development permit for Kootenay Savings Credit Union to build a roughly 380-square-metre, three-storey commercial building at 605 20 Street (behind the 7-11 and McDonald’s on Columbia Avenue).
Finally, July 7 will see the ground-breaking for a $6.5-million gaming centre near the West Kootenay Regional Airport, with completion slated for the spring of 2011.
City director of planning and development Phil Markin said the city has issued $12,881,597 in new building permits so far this year, as compared to the 2009 total of $13,277,563 for the entire year.
“And we’re only halfway through 2010,” he said. “If you go back to 2008, we issued $18,338,000 in new building permits – we’ll be over that (by the end of) this year, I think.”
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