A company with a long history in British Columbia has opened a new branch in a building once dedicated to Salmon Arm’s past.
When its doors first opened in 1967, Salmon Arm’s Centennial Building was home to the city’s Centennial Museum. (The museum sold the building in 1990 and moved to the R.J. Haney Heritage Village and Museum site.) In recent years, the space was occupied by a law firm. Now, the unique local structure at 51 3rd St. NE serves as the Salmon Arm branch of the consulting firm McElhanney.
Founded in Vancouver in 1910 by William Gordon McElhanney, the award-winning company provides geomatics, engineering, GIS and remote sensing, planning, landscape architecture and environmental services, with branches throughout the Interior, including Kamloops, Vernon, Kelowna and now Salmon Arm.
Prior to moving in to the Centennial Building, McElhanney civil engineer Tyson Salo said he and environmental engineer Martin Birse had been working remotely out of the Salmon Arm Innovation Centre for a year.
“It was a one-room situation with two desks, which was great for the two people that we had here, but then we got a few more people into the neighbourhood, and wanted to upgrade so we were hunting around,” said Salo, who immediately loved the upstairs office space at Centennial Building when he first toured it.
Family is another factor behind the opening of McElhanney’s Salmon Arm branch.
“I moved here after two years of working in Vancouver during the Covid pandemic… I was working remotely. It was, let’s see if we can take this and go to a smaller town where we want to live,” said Salo, who is originally from Vernon. His spouse is from Salmon Arm with family in Canoe. “We wanted to move back, to be close to family and to start a family.”
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The area’s various opportunities for outdoor activity and proximity to popular ski hills added to the allure of Salmon Arm.
“We’re all kind of in similar positions family-wise, so we all wanted to move back here, come back with our young professional experiences and offer our services to the city,” said Salo of the Salmon Arm team, which includes biologist Gina Le Bel and structural engineer Joe Moser.
Curious about the building’s history, Salo said he contacted Haney curator/archivist Deborah Chapman for information. It was learned Moser regularly does work with the son of one of the building’s original architects (Meiklejohn & Gower Architects), while Salo said architect Bernd Hermanski, who completed a restoration/expansion project on the building in 1994, is a family friend.
“The fact that it’s a historical building in a really cool part of town with that Centennial connection was just an added benefit to the overall package,” said Salo.
In 2017, McElhanney took the top award for Design and Contract Preparation – Roads, at the 13th annual Deputy Minister’s Consulting Engineers Awards, for their “exceptional work” on the roundabout at Highway 97A and Main Street in Sicamous.
For more information about McElhanney and services the company offers, visit mcelhanney.com.