A donor was offered naming rights on a $60M rebuild. He turned it down

~ NOTL News Crew

Today's the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and for the first time, NOTL isn't marking it alone: the Upward Niagara Chamber of Commerce in Lewiston, New York, is joining as a formal cross-border partner for this morning's 8 a.m. ceremony at Queen's Royal Park, the spot that looks straight across the river at Fort Niagara. A Lockport singer, a former Voice contestant, is doing both anthems. Terry Dow of the NOTL Chamber put it plainly: whatever's happening between the two governments right now, "relationships between people endure." It's a fitting note for a week that's also brought news of a $60-million theatre rebuild nobody wanted their name attached to, and an election five weeks out that's asking this town to think hard about what it actually values. NOTL keeps looking backward and forward at the same time this week. Today especially.

The Royal George Theatre, 111 years old and standing on Queen Street, is being rebuilt from the ground up, and this week the funding finally caught up to the ambition. The federal government committed up to $25 million, announced by St. Catharines MP Chris Bittle, on top of the $35 million Ontario put in back in April 2025. That's $60 million in government money for one theatre in a town of 19,000 people.

The private money tells the better story. Tim and Frances Price gave $10 million, the lead private gift, and Shaw offered them naming rights on the building, the kind of offer most capital campaigns build their whole pitch around. They turned it down. "The Royal George is the Royal George," Tim Price said. "Let's leave it that way." Shaw Festival executive director Tim Jennings, who's presumably had this conversation with a lot of donors over the years, was blunt about how rare that is: those conversations "don't always go that way."

What the money actually buys is the part worth sitting with. The new 350-seat venue is being built for full accessibility, not as an add-on but throughout, including backstage and technical spaces, which Shaw says will make it a world first for accessible catwalks and grids. Artistic director Tim Carroll didn't dress up why that matters: "I saw people who couldn't come to our shows... because they had to be wheeled out... down... a rainy alleyway, to an outside toilet. Those days are gone."

Construction is already underway. The rebuilt Royal George is set to open in fall 2028, which means a chunk of the kids starting kindergarten in NOTL this month will be old enough to actually remember opening night.

There's something worth noticing in the Prices' decision that goes beyond one theatre. NOTL runs on this kind of money, wineries, hotels, donors, families who've been here generations, and most of the time that money comes with a name on a wing or a wall, which is fair, that's usually the deal. This time it didn't, and the theatre stayed exactly what it's always been called. In a town spending a lot of this month arguing about what it wants to become, it's worth noticing what people choose to leave alone.

The Niagara-on-the-Lake Residents Association is running three candidate forum nights at Crossroads Elementary this month: Mon Sept 14 is Lord Mayor night (Vaughan Goettler, Andrea Kaiser, Erwin Wiens), Fri Sept 25 covers six council candidates (Tim Balasiuk, Sandra O'Connor, Karen Taylor-Jones, Maria Mavridis, Andrew Niven, Rick Mills), and Fri Oct 2 covers the other five (Weston Miller, Steve McGuinness, Nicholas Colaneri, Gary Burroughs, Adriana Cater-Vizzari). Doors 5:30pm, forums 6:30-9pm, no registration, recorded and posted to YouTube the next day if you can't make it. The St. Davids Ratepayers Association runs its own forum Wed Sept 16, 7-9pm at the St. Davids Lions Club, with all 14 candidates confirmed and an open floor for questions in the second half. Can't get to a forum or the polls Oct. 26 itself? A voting proxy (a family member or one other eligible voter can cast your ballot) is always an option, and mail-in voting may be too, worth a call to the Clerk's Office to confirm NOTL offers it. Seniors for Climate Niagara has also sent all 14 candidates a written questionnaire on climate commitments, due back Sept 14, with NOTL Local publishing full answers once that deadline passes. And this council's last four meetings before the new one takes over are already on the calendar: Sept 15, 17 and 22, all open to the public in person or online.

Niagara-on-the-Lake has hired an independent firm, FieldForce4, to establish performance baselines for Roads, Water and Parks, the first phase of a new Corporate Performance Reporting Framework that will eventually measure every Town service on community impact, service level, efficiency and customer service. Outside Fire Services, it's the first time the Town has done this formally. Data collection is underway now; the first full results go before Council in 2027, meaning whoever residents elect on Oct. 26 inherits the report card, not the council that commissioned it.

The Town has hired LEA Consulting to study parking across Old Town, Virgil, Glendale, Queenston and St. Davids, and a shuttle service into Old Town is one of the options on the table, along with licence plate readers, permits and demand-based pricing. Two public surveys, one for residents and visitors, one for business owners and employees, are open now through Sept. 30 on the Town's Join the Conversation site.

Community Palliative Care & Wellness turned its usual Hummel Family Healing Cycle Ride into a first-ever Healing Hike along the Heritage Trail last weekend, in the organization's 40th year. The walk itself raised $25,000; the Hummel family, who've now given roughly $150,000 over six years, matched it to $50,000. The money keeps equipment loans, in-home volunteers and bereavement groups free, as they've been since 1986, and helps fund two new peer support groups the organization just opened in Niagara Falls, at that city's own request.

Last year's DSBN boundary change, which shifted some St. Davids students to Crossroads Public School, delivered its first clean win this month: five portable classrooms are gone from St. Davids before the new year even started. Coun. Adriana Vizzari says families are "especially happy" about it. The catch is that some families relocated to Crossroads' catchment are struggling to land spots in the YMCA's before- and after-school programs there. A new daycare, Way to Learn at St. Michael Catholic Elementary, is expected to open mid-September pending inspections, which may help, but doesn't solve the YMCA gap directly.

Niagara Region Public Health confirmed its first lab-confirmed human West Nile case of 2026 this week, in St. Catharines, a sign the virus is actively circulating regionwide. Most infections show no symptoms, but 1 per cent get genuinely serious ones. Standard precautions apply: DEET or Icaridin repellent, no standing water around the yard, screens that actually seal, long sleeves at dusk.

Sepehr Reybod picked up trumpet at 11, played through jazz and concert band in high school, and taught himself classical guitar alongside it. Then he found theatre, and somewhere around a full course load with no room left for electives, he had to choose. Acting won. He earned a BFA from York, and by 2014 he'd put both instruments down entirely, for a decade, telling himself he'd lost the ability to engage with music at all.

What brought it back wasn't a plan, it was Autumn in the Air, the annual showcase where Shaw's actors, crew and staff perform outside their day jobs. In his first season with the company last year, his partner and fellow ensemble member Madelyn Miyashita, a multi-instrumentalist, suggested they do a trumpet duet. Reybod didn't even own one, he had to rent it for the show. "I actually never owned a trumpet," he says. "So I started practicing again." His family gave him his first one, ever, for his birthday not long after.

Reybod won't be performing at this year's show on Sept. 14, he'll be there helping out instead, but the pull is clearly still there. "What I found really exciting was seeing colleagues, friends, people I've seen around the community... belting out a song," he says. "I was moved by their skill and their passion doing something that I didn't know they could do." This year's concert, mostly classical with a little jazz, benefits Newark Neighbours Food Bank instead of the usual Shaw artists' fund, everyone involved donating their time.

Catch Autumn in the Air Sept. 14 at St. Mark's Anglican, doors 6:30, tickets on Eventbrite. Last year sold out.

The Prices could have put their name on a $60-million building and nobody would have blinked. They didn't. NOTL's got no shortage of people who've quietly given real time or money to this town without needing their name on anything for it. Who's yours: who do you know here who's done something like that, and never made a thing of it?

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