Market forces take Peachland church expropriation for new firehall off table

Parishioners and leaders at Peachland’s Baptist Church have had their prayers answered, but it wasn’t divine intervention.

After months of the church pushing back against possible expropriation of the land their church sits on, District of Peachland council is scaling down plans to construct a new firehall as one component of a development that could have included other protective services and commercial and residential spaces. 

This means expropriating the Baptist Church’s property to make room for what would have been a large project with a significant footprint is no longer on the district’s table.

Peachland mayor Patrick Van Minsel made the public announcement last week moments after district council voted in a closed meeting on a downsized approach for a new firehall to replace the current aging facility on 3rd Street. Reaction from the Baptist Church was swift and clear.

“We have always publicly supported the need for a new fire hall, and we applaud the decision of the town to return to a basic hall design that won’t displace us. This is a great decision for us, but also for the whole community,” said Baptist Church pastor Lyle Wahl in a statement posted to the church’s website a day following the district’s announcement. 

The statement at peachlandbaptistcanada.com also provides an indication of four years of sometimes fractious negotiations that arose over the district’s efforts to buy the church lands, with the more recent threat of expropriation if no agreement on a purchase price could be reached. Earlier statements describe the district’s approach as “aggressive”. 

“For many years the town has pursued acquisition of the church’s property, more recently with expropriation being raised as tool that the town might use to force the issue. Although the church has been clear it never wanted to move, because of the importance of a fire hall it has attempted to collaborate on a mutually agreeable solution, including a potential move of the church building to a different lot. Those plans were recently rejected by the town given the expense to relocate on terms that are mutually agreeable,” the statement reads. 

Wahl said in an interview he had no indication that last week’s announcement was coming, but he and his congregation are happy that the “protracted phase of destabilization” as the district pressed forward with its proposed plan has come to an end. 

“I think they are relieved and glad that the process is over. When you’ve been going through this for four years, that’s a pretty long process,” said Wahl. “So now we can move on to other things. We have other things to think about.”

Located at 4204 Lake Avenue, just north of Bliss Bakery, the Baptist Church became tangled in the district’s vision to build a new firehall on an adjacent parcel of land it owns on San Clemente Avenue. 

As recently as last fall, that vision involved a public-private partnership, also known as a P3, in which the new firehall complex would have included affordable rental housing, commercial spaces, a community policing office, a B.C. Ambulance station and possibly even a new city hall. Funds generated by those extra features were needed to meet the ballooning cost of a state-of-the-art firehall. 

But a project of that size would have required a site larger than the parcel the district owns on San Clemente Avenue, leading the district to engage the Baptist Church in negotiations to buy the adjacent church property. However, the two sides were far apart on the price, according to the church. A statement posted to its website last summer said a “like-for-like” replacement of their property was just over $4.3 million, while the district had offered a third of that.

The district undertook a prequalification process for the proposed P3 in late 2025, which helped push council to scale the project down, said Van Minsel said in an interview last week. He also said that the cost to acquire the church property was not an issue; rather, he said, council didn’t want to push the church to do something it didn’t want to do, and a changing market means residential and commercial components are no longer a viable way to cover building costs.

“We decided we don’t really want to go that way. We don’t want to acquire a property that doesn’t really want to be acquired. So that was for us was off the table already, and then the P3 came back with saying, hey, it’s not possible for us due to market circumstances, so the residential market and the commercial market is not there for us,” he said.

Peachland residents authorized the district, in a 2022 referendum, to borrow $17.5 million for a new firehall. Van Minsel said constructioni costs have risen dramatically since then, and investigating a P3 was the responsible thing for council to do. “We think you can leave no stone unturned when it comes to taxpayers’ money. That’s what we’re elected for. We’re just going to approve something that we know is not in our budget. That would be reckless and we’re not going to do that,” he said.

The district will issue a request for proposals as soon as this week for a scaled-down firehall at a maximum cost of $16 million, Van Minsel said, but the all bells and whistles that a start-of-the-art firehall could contain won’t be known until the district learns whether its $7 million grant application to the Canada Community Building Fund is successful. That won’t be known until April or May, he said.

People should see the San Clemente Avenue site being prepared for construction this summer, and depending on which contractor is successful, construction on the new firehall should be begin at end of 2026 or early 2027 for completion in 2028, Van Minsel said.

— This article was originally published by the Peachland Post and shared through the Local Journalism Initiative.