Capital Daily for Monday, September 21

Hermann's Jazz Club is on track to reopen this fall, and the hardest part is finished.

The downtown club nearly closed at the end of April, when repairs and years of financial trouble looked too steep to clear. Music fans raised the $450K needed to keep it going within a month. Then crews pulled up the floor and found worse than expected: extensive deterioration and damage to two original load-bearing posts.

Arts on View Society board chair Al Smith said the fix took engineers, fabricators, and tradespeople working in close coordination, and put the project a month behind schedule. New pillars and a concrete floor are now in place.

While that work paused, the society sorted out its books. Hermann's GST hadn't been filed or paid since 2022. All four years are now paid, the society hired a new accounting firm, and Smith said Arts on View is once again in good standing as a registered society. The next step is hiring an artistic director to shape the programming.

A costumed T. rex and a woman riding a flamingo took to the streets of Sooke on Saturday, part of the third annual Sooke Grand Parade. Dozens walked the 2.5- or 5-kilometre route for the future Sooke Gathering Place, a drop-in centre that would serve seniors, youth and families.

The walk pulled in more than $16,000 toward a $20,000 target, with money still coming in. Across all the health network's events, the project has now raised over $410,000. Building the thing is estimated at $2 million.

The organizers say Sooke has gone 17 years without a seniors centre, one of the few communities in the province without one. A 2025 bid for provincial seniors-housing funding failed, so the plan shifted to a standalone building on municipal land at Wadams Way, beside the library.

The next test is the ballot box. On Oct. 17, alongside the municipal election, Sooke voters face a non-binding question: should the district consider borrowing up to $5 million for an intergenerational community centre? A yes vote authorizes nothing on its own.