“The department of health is shutting ‘er down” 80 year old Doug Cutler said mournfully, while watching a public health officer letting tenants know the building is condemned.
Galt Manor is an 85-year-old building in downtown Lethbridge.
Cutler has owned it for seven years, and said that while the first five were uneventful, that’s recently changed.
He said he had good tenants until around two years ago, when people started loitering outside the building and intimidating the residents.
“They came in herds, started sitting on the doorstep” Cutler said, “They started bugging people and good people started to leave. They’ve chased away all of my good tenants.”
To keep the units occupied, Cutler turned to a pair of local agencies for help, but says that only made matters worse.
“Basically I got down to a point where because they were put in here by McMan or Arches or somebody, I needed the income. It just deteriorated to a point where that’s where I am now. I just have no money left.”
According to Cutler, drug users and non-paying tenants have taken over the building, using the lawn in the summer, and the hallways in winter, leaving behind used needles, human waste, and stolen goods.
Cutler said he spends at least 10 hours there every day and each day he said he can turn away 60 to 80 people.
He’s acting as a security guard for the building most of the time; cleaning up and keeping people out.
Health officials have condemned the building and have given Cutler a list of things that need to be repaired and cleaned before tenants are allowed back into the building, but he says he doesn’t have the money to complete them and doesn’t know what the future holds for the building.
“If these people continue to roam here. If this is what it is, its impossible to run a business here.”
Cutler says he talked to Lethbridge City Councillor Ryan Parker, who told him, there’s not much the city can do. Parker said he looked at the building in October.
“It is quite concerning what was occurring there,” Parker told Global News, “I used the opportunity to tell members of the police service about the concerns in that area, they advised me that it’s been a continual issue in the downtown. So as a member of council I can’t do much more than that.”
Lethbridge Police Service says they have been trying to manage the reoccurring issues for years.
Sergeant Cam Van Roon said they’re keeping a police presence there as much as they can.
“We have officers out of their own initiative, as part of our downtown policing unit, that are going there doing walk through’s as many as 5 or 6 times a day on their own, to try and ensure things are going as best they can there” Van Roon said.
So far Cutler’s received two offers to purchase his building, and an offer from someone to clean it out for free, but he’s not sure where to go from here.
“Really I can’t make a decision until I can look that this and get a real solid number on what its going to cost to get it up and running again,” the landlord acknowledges, “do I want to do it? I’m on my own and that’s the way it is.”
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