Business owners in downtown Prince George are calling for a local state of emergency to be declared after a recent series of fires have threatened their businesses.
In the past week alone, fires were set outside the Nancy O’s and Betulla Burning restaurants, which led owner Eoin Foley to send an email on Friday to Mayor Simon Yu, council, MPs, MLAs, RCMP and local media to draw attention to the matter.
“Business owners are in a desperate crisis,” said Foley, who is also president of the downtown business association. “This is a constant, daily threat. If this does not constitute [the need for] emergency action, what possibly does?
“I am very grateful that Nancy O’s did not burn to the ground,” he said, noting the scorch marks on the building.
The fire issue has become a flashpoint since Sept. 5 when CrossRoads Brewing, a cornerstone downtown business, was destroyed in an apparent arson just steps away from city hall. It’s estimated that the fire caused $1.8 million in damage and the owners have said they will not reopen in the location without safety improvements to the area.
“We are under siege,” CrossRoads co-owners Daryl Leiski and Cindy Zurowski wrote to council in a letter dated Sept. 16, in which they asked the city to take action.
WATCH | Downtown businesses say they can no longer operate without improved security:
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Since then, other businesses have been sharing their experience of finding scorch marks and burning materials outside their buildings on a regular basis. Just days after the CrossRoads fire, nightclub owner Michelle Sakamoto found smoldering cardboard jammed into the doorway of her business.
“It’s like a kick in the teeth,” she said. “We just can’t seem to keep up with it.”
Other business owners and managers have chimed in, sharing fear that another business will soon be lost to an unattended or intentional fire.
“This problem continues to grow and we need to use every tool available to our downtown,” said Darren Low, the owner of City Furniture. He was one of a number of business representatives that responded to Foley’s email and agreed to be quoted by CBC.
Warren Sunstrum, a chef at Betulla Burning, shared his own pictures of a burned tree, which he said he took after witnessing a man dousing a hoodie in gasoline then setting it on fire. It was “a blatant act of vandalism and arson.”
“The police never showed up, there was no investigation, nor was there any footage collected to try and find this criminal. And this was just days after CrossRoad burned down,” he wrote.
Chef Warren Sunstrum says he has witnessed people use gasoline to start fires in downtown Prince George, and has had difficulty getting rapid police response. (Warren Sunstrum)
Nancy O’s and Betualla co-owner Garrett Fedorkiw said declaring a local state of emergency would send “a strong signal” that elected leaders “mean business and are ready to defend our community.”
“Confidence is at an all-time low,” he wrote. “People are scared.”
Mayor Yu and the council did not respond to the emails publicly. And the city was not immediately available to comment when CBC News reached out to them.
Ongoing issue
Concerns about fires being set downtown has been ongoing for more than a year. But the loss of CrossRoads has businesses speaking out more strongly on the need for immediate action.
Downtown Prince George, which represents more than 400 businesses and property owners, and the local chamber of commerce are holding a rally to bring attention to the need for public safety on Oct. 16.
In 2024, the city and RCMP partnered on a pilot project, which set up patrols searching for fires downtown over a period of 10 nights. In that time, they found 58 fires burning. The patrols were not extended due to staffing costs.
However, the city is asking businesses and individuals to register any CCTV cameras they have to help the RCMP gather evidence in future investigations.
The idea of calling a state of local emergency has been floated by other communities dealing with downtown disorder. In Williams Lake, Mayor Surinderpal Rathor and the council ultimately backed away from the idea after getting additional RCMP officers this summer.
Any local government in B.C. can declare a local state of emergency for up to 14 days, but only in instances where they need additional powers to deal with a situation such as a natural disaster or wildfire. The province has the ability to rescind or extend such a declaration based on whether they believe the criteria are met.
Prince George has not indicated whether it will entertain the request from the downtown businesses.
However, Mayor Yu and the council asked the province for more support to tackle the issue during the Union of B.C. Municipalities meetings, which were held in Victoria from Sept. 22 to 26.
B.C. Premier David Eby announced on Sept. 26 that Prince George will get an involuntary care facility. He said it will help improve public safety by removing people experiencing mental illness or addiction so severe that it impacts the safety of themselves and those around them who have not sought voluntary care.
Meanwhile, the RCMP said they are attempting to get a handle on the downtown security issues. A suspect was arrested in the case of the CrossRoads fire and on Friday police said they’d arrested two more people believed to be responsible for starting fires in the city.
During the 2024 patrols, city staff reported that a number of people they talked to on the street said they were seeking shelter and fires outside businesses because they had nowhere else to go.
But in the year since, the city and province have opened additional shelter spaces and RCMP Supt. Darrin Rappel said with the additional spaces, “it is completely unnecessary to start a warming fire under any circumstance against or nearby any business, building or structure. This is criminal behaviour, meant to cause harm.”
When fires are reported to police, they act as quickly as possible to try and respond, he said.
But Foley said it is difficult to keep up, especially when the fires are being set overnight when businesses aren’t open. That’s what happened with the latest fires by his restaurants. Whoever set them “was long gone by the time the staff found the evidence.”
