Kamloops Search and Rescue again looking for new home after parting ways with Cooper Foundation

Kamloops Search and Rescue is looking for another new home after parting ways with the Cooper Family Foundation, which for the past three years had been building the organization a new space in North Kamloops.

Since 2019, the foundation has been renovating the Cooper Companies building at the corner of York Avenue and Eighth Street, which was to be the new home of Kamloops Search and Rescue and Search (KSAR) and Rescue and Detection K9s of British Columbia (SRD K9s) as their Wings Above Kamloops recipients.

Now, the more than 9,000-square-foot facility will be home to SRD K9s alone, as of a pending May 1 opening.

KSAR president Dwaine Brooke told KTW that over the past three years it has taken to get the project completed amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, “things changed,” and the foundation and KSAR mutually agreed the situation “wasn’t going to work out.”

Asked what those circumstances were, Brooke said he’s not at liberty to discuss them.

“We have great respect for Cooper Foundation, they really mean well, but in the end it just was not going to work,” he said. “It wasn’t really about money, it was just other details and the like.”

Brooke said while they’re disappointed in the split with the Cooper Foundation project, the board decided the project wasn’t in KSAR’s best interest.

Cooper Family Foundation president and CEO Nelly Dever said KSAR’s newly elected board of directors changed the direction of their organization and no longer wished to be part of the centre of excellence.

She said the foundation had not changed the terms of the agreement, and was committed to giving KSAR everything that had been agreed to from day one — 10 years of free rent, a 12,000 square-foot facility with specific bays and board rooms. But their newly appointed board had a different vision.

While she cannot speak to why the KSAR board changed its mind, Dever noted the organization has never had its own home and may have felt it too much of a responsibility to take on, noting the foundation brought in out-of-province consultation to assist in that regard, but ultimately KSAR wasn’t comfortable moving forward.

“It came as a shock to us,” Dever said of the decision.

KSAR manager Alan Hobler told KTW he’s no longer on the search team’s executive and cannot comment on the decision to part ways with the project.

“The executive worked hard on this piece and I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision to come to,” Hobler told KTW.

Back in 2019, Hobler told KTW the facility donation would be KSAR’s first permanent location since the organization’s inception in the 1970s.

Now the volunteer search team remains at its current location at a city-owned property, where it also does not pay rent, but the organization is still looking for another location to build its own headquarters.

“We’ve got a few ideas and options. It’ll obviously take us a few years to get that together, but we’re just starting that process,” Brooke said.

Plans to house a day care at the reconstructed Cooper Centre, which was part of the original plans for the remodelled building, also fell through in the time since the project launched in 2019.


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