For Prince George to be truly ready to host some of Canada's top young athletes in less than two years, Ken Biron said more work needs to be done to make downtown businesses accessible.
The technical advisor with the Handy Circle Resource Society would like to see ramps installed at all downtown businesses with steps in front of them before athletes, coaches, officials and fans start arriving for the 2015 Canada Winter Games.
Handy Circle is proposing Prince George follow in the footsteps of other communities that have used the Stop Gap program to provide small wooden ramps to willing building owners. Biron estimates about 80 per cent of buildings downtown would require the ramps to allow people in wheelchairs to easily overcome the small steps from the sidewalks to the front doors.
"Those buildings cannot be made [permanently] accessible because of the expense of renovations due to how they were designed from the 1940s to the 1980s," Biron said. "These threshold ramps will overcome that temporarily and when new buildings are built they will be made accessible."
The Prince George plan is still in the brainstorming stage and Biron doesn't have a price tag for what it would take to acquire the supplies and construct the ramps, but he's hoping to secure a grant from the city early next year to help cover the costs. A maintenance program would also be required to deal with regular wear and tear and to ensure safety.
By providing them at no cost to building owners, Biron said the ramps will benefit local businesses by allowing them to serve a larger clientele.
"They'll be offered them and if they accept them, which we hope they will... then we would consider it a success and we would build them a ramp," Biron said, adding no building would be forced to have a ramp.
The society has already reached out to groups like AiMHi, the College of New Caledonia and local high schools to see if anyone is willing to take on a contract to construct the plywood ramps. Biron is hoping to have some of them in place as soon as next spring so they can be used and tested well in advance of the games beginning.
If successful, the ramps would also provide a legacy as they could be used by disabled residents and visitors for years to come.
