Members of the financially-troubled Legion have approved the sale of their building.
In all, 109 members turned out for a special meeting Monday night and voted 100-per-cent in favour of the deal, past president John Scott said, which will see the Legion receive $650,000 from an undisclosed buyer and gives the organization a year to find a new home.
Scott, who was involved in the negotiations, called the sale "wonderful."
"We're sad to lose that building that a lot of people in this city, a lot of veterans, have put a lot of work in to develop that building and make it what it is today," Scott said. "The problem is, it's no longer viable for us to stay in that building. It's costing us too much, it's time to move on and our debt load was huge."
The branch was facing an estimated $400,000 shortfall for a roughly 60-year-old building built when the Legion had 3,000 members, much more than the 700 there are now.
"The numbers have declined for different reasons - age and the drinking laws and the smoking laws and everything has kind of worked against clubs in the last while," Scott said. "Membership didn't decline so much as the number of people who used the branch."
Scott said the next step will likely be to lease, as opposed to buy, a new home half the size of the 18,000 square feet the existing branch occupies.
"That was one of our big problems," Scott said. "The Legion was just too big to justify...you don't need an auditorium for 700 members."
The sale will be closed at the end of May and Scott said the new owners have a fairly major overhaul planned for the building, located on Seventh Avenue next door to Two Rivers Gallery.
The Legion will continue to support various social causes, Scott said.
"We had wanted to do a housing project and maybe in the future we'll be able to have enough money and the wherewithal to do such a thing," Scott said. "We're a social organization, we work for the community and with the community and that's what we're about."
The Legion will retain ownership of its liquor licence.
"Wherever we go, we'll take that with us," Scott said.
