City announces plans to demolish Flin Flon Hotel

One of uptown Flin Flon's biggest - and longest vacant - buildings will come down this summer.

Mayor George Fontaine said that the City will demolish the Flin Flon Hotel later this year, confirming the move during their March 7 city council meeting. One of the largest buildings on Main Street, the hotel has been almost entirely vacant for almost 30 years.

Confirmation of the demolition first came as an aside during a conversation about the City's recent decision to sell several lots of land along Church Street to the Flin Flon Aboriginal Friendship Centre - the centre has proposed building transitional housing on the site, which is currently the parking lot between the centre and the former Rock City Diner. 

When asked what the project would mean for parking near Main Street, Fontaine alluded to the hotel being demolished, later outright confirming it.

"This summer, we're going to take down a very large building that's going to create parking spots. Until such time it becomes anything else, the City of Flin Flon is the lucky owner of a hotel that is soon to be landfill. That's coming down this summer, as far as I know," said Fontaine.

Fontaine's announcement was met with applause by some attendees of the meeting.

The hotel, which opened in the 1930s and was partially rebuilt after a 1962 fire, closed in 1996 and has been mostly vacant since. Ownership of the building has changed hands several times since, most recently being purchased in late 2018 by a trio of local businesspeople who tried to remodel the building into a bowling alley, restaurant, bar and rental suites. The City regained possession of the building last year and it was not purchased during the City's most recent property tax sale.

The building's roof has been in need of repairs for years and, most recently, windows for the second-floor suites in the rear of the building had been boarded shut. Mould was visible in the concrete on the main floor walls of the hotel - other portions of the hotel were water damaged, due to leaks from the damaged roof. Tens of thousands of dollars were also owed as back taxes on the building as of 2019.

When asked what the demolition would require, Fontaine quipped, "It's probably going to be dusty," before discussing that the project still needs to be tendered, adding that the hotel's derelict state was to blame for the pending blow-up.

"It is more than time. It's not just there - nobody's picked it up for a number of years, nobody's going to pick it up and it has become a difficulty for policing, it's become a difficulty for lots of things," said the mayor.

"The technicalities of how it comes down, I guess the people who demolish it will have to decide on that."

No tender has yet been released for the building's demolition - that will come later this year.

"It will be tendered shortly - I believe at this point, Adem [Adebayo, the City's director of works and operations] is putting together the tender and we'll see where it goes from there," said City chief administrative officer Lyn Brown.

"I think the process is we will set out a tender and once we send out a tender and decide who the company is, we're going to okay it and we're going to demolish the building," Fontaine said.