Coulee Dam commits to heating old theater

Fixing the heating and cooling system in Coulee Dam’s “Community Building,” where the Rio Grande Restaurant, the bowling alley and soon a reopened theater operate, just got a higher priority.

The city council OK’d a plan to tap funds, if needed to patch the roof, as Larry Hernandez digs into his project to get a new HVAC system in the building. He’s been consulting with companies to get the place heated over the winter.

Hernandez plans to re-open the Village Cinema, which close 11 years ago when the industry changed to require all digital projector equipment. But three old HVAC systems on the roof are junk, and nobody is sure what they’ll find under them when they take them off the roof.

A big patch job might be required, just the approach Mayor Bob Poch said he’d been hoping to avoid. The city has been trying to save up a fund to fix the whole flat roof, but the $150,000 in it now is not enough.

Nevertheless, the city now has a new tenant in Hernandez who is willing to work to revive its old asset. That puts more urgency into the project, and the new tenant attended the council meeting Oct. 9 to help it along.

In other business, the city is also discussing a franchise agreement with the Colville Tribes, who intend to serve the community with a fiber optic network, the council was told. Some details of a contract are still in the discussion stage.

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation have been awarded over $48.4 million through the federal Commerce Department’s Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program to “install fiber directly connecting 2,867 unserved Native American households with qualifying broadband with the following speeds: Fiber: 1 Gbps symmetrical; wireless: 300/30 Mbps,” the program’s website states.

The plan will also serve all residents of the reservation, the site says. A project map includes the whole town in the proposed service area.