Buying a new building comes with its fair share of headaches. Not many buildings come with needing a “Bat Droppings Verification Inspection Report.”
Yet that’s what was on the table in front of the post office’s new owners Jesse Crozier and Cassandra Germsheid at the June 19 Battleford town council meeting.
The meeting’s biggest news was the timelines for getting the old Battleford post office up and running again. Crozier and Germsheid explained that most of the work done on the building will be cosmetic as opposed to structural.
“It’ll be more of a restoration than a renovation,” Crozier said.
Some stairwells require work and the building’s exterior will be cleaned with a dry-ice machine to remove the mineral staining. Germsheid said the building should look like it did back in 1913 once the exterior work is finished.
The second and third floors are to be restored, but Crozier and Germsheid have yet to determine what they’ll be used for. Crozier said that Canada Post should be in the building by Nov. 1, if not earlier.
Germshied said fixing the clock will be the next focus after getting Canada Post back in the building. Crozier said he ran into some issues he hadn’t foreseen, such as the east and south clock faces running slowly. He said the clock is functional but there are some things he wants to inspect with a man lift before making the clock fully operational.
“We don’t want to put undo stress [on the clock] before we figure out exactly what we should be doing with it,” Crozier said.
Crozier and Germsheid added that they haven’t found any more bats and possible bat entrances are sealed. A Canada Post representative said that bats were the reason Canada Post left the building.
"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but we’ve had to urgently put in place temporary arrangements because of health and safety concerns with the presence of bats in the Battleford Post Office building,” Mouktar Abdillahi told the News-Optimist in Oct. 2015.
Councillors thanked the new owners, and Crozier and Germsheid stayed for the rest of the meeting.
“I’ve never been to one of these,” Crozier said.
“Hang on to your hat,” said Chief Administrative Officer John Enns-Wind.
In other news, the Fred Light museum board was happy to see that 250 people were on the RSVP list for their June 23 event.
Revenue due to building permits was slightly more this year than what is was last year at this point. May 2017 there were five permits taken out, for a total of $1,502,980. Four were residential and one was commercial. Leslie said last year at this time there were nine permits or the year to date worth $1,079,000.
“We started the year off really slow, but we’ve caught up in the last couple months and pulled ahead of where we were last year at this time,” Leslie said.
The next council meeting will be July 17. And keep an eye on the News-Optimist for exclusive post office updates.
