JOHNSON – The challenges of building a gondola from McArthur Island to TRU

AN ARTICLE popped up this week.

Mitch Forgie – owner of Red Beard Café and Nigel’s Speakeasy, a partner of Bright Eye Brewing and involved with the Brewloops Beer Festival – is now the Destination Development Manager for Tourism Kamloops.

His goal with applying for the City position for him seems to be about … or at least include … wanting to build a gondola from McArthur Island Park to TRU and Aberdeen Mall.
I’ll defer the details to news articles.

Forgie estimates the cost of the gondola would top out at $60 million and breaks down the economic costs and benefits on his Stronger Kamloops blog post (a recommended read), along with ideas for using surface parking property sales and development opportunities to fund capital costs.

For clarity, ‘surface parking property sales’ means the City selling parking lot revenue access (in this case the entire McArthur Island Park parking lot that surrounds the ENTIRE McArthur Island Sport and Event Centre) to private concerns who then charge for parking in perpetuity.

Let that sink in. Anyone here play hockey or curl or attend graduations?

Then include the ENTIRE parking lot area at TRU (developed and as yet undeveloped) north of the University buildings … all of them, privatized. Granted most of this is already TRU paid parking, but it’s fair to say that students will have to pay more, to say nothing about a complete long-term loss of revenue for TRU. I’m pretty sure they won’t be too happy about that.

It’s not the first time a ‘gondola’ has been suggested in Kamloops … the top of Mt. Paul restaurant with gondola access … you know, the idea that we resoundingly said ‘naa … we’re good’, and the TteS didn’t jump to pay for?

This time it comes with a promise of private dollars to build it … and Forgie seems to be suggesting a ‘build it and they will come’ trajectory. Both riders and surrounding business and residential development, will apparently just show up.

Here’s the Hot Take

Although heartened to see such a specific claim that public taxpayer dollars will not be used to build or operate this … a few concerns pop up:

1. On the geography side, look at the map above, and follow the red line. This is supposed to be the ‘it’s cheaper if it’s straight’ suggested gondola line. Notice near the top, the red line blips off twice on its way to Aberdeen Mall north lot across Hillside Drive.

If you follow the red line in reality, it either cuts underground right through Kenna Cartright Park as well as travels either underground thru the hill at TRU beside 1025 University – the New Rez big housing tower … or tall poles will navigate it over these hills … right through a scenic and much-loved natural park.

Let’s let that pass for now and look otherwise at the project.

2. Should one day this gondola close for whatever reason, every parking spot would forever be paid parking with no long-term City benefit. Attaching this risk to a single item like this is just bizarre. A potential proponent should go to the McArthur Island Park parking lot right now and look around; this usually empty lot is your future income from parking.

Instead of the City benefitting from the initial deal, the cash is going to another private company to build a gondola that also doesn’t benefit the City coffers, as it’s a private company that owns and operates the gondola.

Kamloops taxpayers would now pay for parking at McPark … ie. a new user tax. But no, no, no … no tax dollars used. Not at all.
/s

For those out of the lingo loop … /s means ‘sarcasm alert’. All the kids are doing it.

3. Another concern may be that months or a year from now, when the momentum is chugging along to build this, we suddenly hear that there will be some operational or maintenance costs to be borne by the City, or at the very least property tax excusal under some hairbrained transit benefit program. Bound to happen.

This is how this stuff works; proponents claim it as a taxpayer freebee up front, but eventually “… actually it’s not” when some unforeseen or hidden costs are planted on the City, and the annual budget item is recommended for adoption by an overpriced City ‘consultant study’ that uses the word ‘green’ a few times.

Hands at the horseshoe go up.

Members of this Council will likely say “it’s only a cup of Starbucks a day” as the value play.
Should be a /s … unfortunately it isn’t.

4. The business case: What’s the max potential ridership of the proposal? It’s not a bus route you can add more busses to. The design is static. The max number of riders will forever be a hard number … so growth is not a thing. Numbers: Per hour? Per day? Per year?

And how does that add up as a revenue generator, vis-a-vis capital cost payback and the profit margin for a private company? Because ridership max is a locked commodity, revenue is as well. Balance that with actual annual ridership numbers … even off season … and is the single ticket cost still reasonable? You can bet that transit and TRU passes will not apply on this thing … why should they, it’s not part of the transit system. The owners want that sweet revenue and is not about to allow any free rides.

Nowhere in Mr. Forgie’s blog or statements does he have any independent market research, or actual statistical forecasts regarding on season, off season and therefore annual ridership.
What he does do on his blog is use a comparative project … The Portland Aerial Tram at Oregon Health Science University (OHSU … not OSHU as Forgie calls it).

Portland’s OHSU is a large university campus with 45 buildings, and is home to several medical schools. The hospital mentioned is a 12-building Health Center with a 700-bed acute hospital.
Both university, health center and hospital have an employee base of about 21,000.

OHSU also sits atop a small mountain called Marquam Hill. Road access is extremely poor, with zero road access from the downtown side … at all. A unique kind of public transit needed to be considered, as there was no real alternative choice.

The university paid for 80 per cent of the tram construction, and it’s owned by the City, because as a public service … it makes sense, and it’s linked into the public transit system. It has a business case that just works.

This use case is as far as you can get from the proposed use in Kamloops which is basically shopping and recreational. Like … Aberdeen hotel users will use it to get to McPark events; via a six-eight block walk to the north side of Aberdeen Mall all the way from Rogers Way in winter to get to a hockey tourney, cross over a highway and return uphill the other way … but a shuttle the City can add will handle that.

Another tax.

Adding ‘restaurants and patios’ to this equation as a way to promote the idea is clearly about coming up with talking points that don’t exist. So much of Forgie’s blog prospectus is so stuffed with empty justifications, it smacks of ‘build it and they (riders, restaurants, patios and paid parking) will come’.

s/

Look … it’s all just word salad. It’s just another idea that has not had any real independent market analysis to discover if people want it, or will use it at all, and at first glance does not seem to have even the simplest of business case for itself or any real-world benefit from the locations it will stop at, or the City, or TRU or the people of Kamloops. It just doesn’t pass the initial sniff test.

Oh … and BTW there are reasons locations use these trams and gondolas only on ski mountains … people are auto-dressed for mountain weather to ski or board. Even when heated, gondolas are not indoor warm. TRU and mall visitors and event goers don’t wear ski suits around town in winter. They expect to stay warm. Expecting to run this year-round to answer market demand … climate change accepted … is just not going to happen.

I probably would not take it a second time in winter from the mall. The car, or a taxi, or the bus is warmer.

It’s one of those schemes the City needs to financially protect itself from.

Let it happen politically? Maybe, but at the same time protect us all from its likely failure.

For the gondola itself, I’d like to see a contract between the City and any private developer or consortium up front, that in return for the parcels of land for paid parking and to install the gondola (McPark etc.) there will be no costs to be absorbed by the City over the long term, it must pay for itself in every way.

And should the installed gondola become commercially unviable at any future time, the City should demand to receive and hold in trust for the owner an amount of money to dismantle it, even if such developer claims bankruptcy or insolvency.

A little insurance is the idea. Don’t leave us taxpayers to clean up a mess we can see coming.

So, a gondola from nowhere I want to go, to somewhere I can already get to, paid for by … private equity … but we will all pay the long-term costs, lose parking and have to look at wires and boxes against our park and skyline.

But all it will cost me is a cup of Starbucks a day.
/s

David Johnson is a Kamloops resident, community volunteer and self described maven of all things Canadian.