Three Years And Counting: Why Are Prince George's Heritage Signs Still Not Up?

Back in November 2024, the chair of Prince George's Heritage Commission gave city staff six weeks' notice of a meeting to bring together the partners behind the city's heritage signs. He was told no meeting had been authorized, and that staff could not attend an "unanticipated" meeting after working hours. The meeting went ahead without them.

Nearly two years on, not one new heritage sign has gone in the ground.

The commission's own proposal from July 2023 split the project into three phases covering more than 60 signs: 24 downtown, 18 along the Centennial Connector, and 20 on the Heritage River trail and elsewhere. Downtown was to be fabricated and installed in year one, with a phase a year after that. On that timeline, the whole project would have been finished by around the end of 2026.

Instead, phase one is still at the design stage. Approval of the downtown sign texts has been put off to December 10, pending Lheidli T'enneh's review. The commission still hasn't chosen between aluminum signs from Montreal's Kalitec and glazed ceramic tiles. Phases two and three survive only as a recurring to-do item, with no revised timeline.

Why? Part of the answer lies with who has, and hasn't, had the authority to move it forward.

A commission with one hand tied - Chair George Davison has led the Heritage Commission since early 2023, with volunteers tracking vendor quotes and researching the history behind each sign. Even that research is heavy lifting: so little of the original sign text seems to have been kept, Davison wrote last November, that checking it "has been time-consuming."

The commission is advisory. It cannot direct city staff, compel partners to attend, or apply for grants on its own. Davison told council in March 2025 that before COVID the commission met ten times a year with three staff supporting it; since 2021 it has met four times a year, for 90 minutes, with support he had been told amounted to less than one per cent of its liaison's workload. Setting up a single five-person meeting, he said, took 31 emails over three weeks.

Any spending, even $750 for two mock-up signs, waits for a vote at one of those quarterly meetings. Council set aside about $107,000 for sign replacement in the 2026 budget, but that money can only be spent through the city's procurement process, and procurement rules were not explained to the commission in person until June 11, 2026. The staff liaison role, added on top of a planner's existing job, has been held by three different people since the project began.

What the city and council said, and what they did - In June 2025, a staff report said more support would need a new position, such as a Heritage Planner, then advised against it: "Administration believes the current scope of the Staff Liaison role provides appropriate and sufficient support for the Commission." The reason given was that "the Commission's current level of activity and number of deliverables remain limited." That argument is circular: those limits came from the very coordination gap the report described. The same report also stated that if a heritage project needed Lheidli T'enneh input, "Administration will coordinate with LTFN."

On July 14, 2025, council dealt with the commission's requests. Membership rose from nine to twelve, with the new seats going to the library, the Exploration Place and the public. Councillor Trudy Klassen's motion to raise meetings for the commission from four to seven a year was defeated, six councillors opposed, after staff cited their workload. Her motion to look into more staff support passed, and her motion on reconciliation with Lheidli T'enneh was referred to staff to discuss with the First Nation.

A Heritage Planner then went into the draft 2026 budget. In December, at staff's suggestion, council unanimously folded it into a new arts, culture and heritage role. Councillor Tim Bennett asked what would happen if council then didn't fund the job. In January, it didn't: Klassen moved to approve the $123,643 position, then moved to refer it back to staff to explore sharing staff with the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George. The referral carried unanimously. As far as we can find, there is still no position.

Three of those threads — the promise to coordinate with Lheidli T'enneh, the referral to discuss joint projects with the First Nation, and the report on sharing staff with the regional district — have not come back to council in any public agenda we could find. Of all the delays in this story, those sit most squarely with City Hall.

The missing partner - Lheidli T'enneh's involvement is crucial to the project, but it has been ad hoc. A mid-2024 meeting with then-councillor Josh Seymour was promising, but by June 2025 he was no longer the working group's liaison. The commission had sought meetings with the First Nation since 2023 and listed the relationship as outstanding in chair reports from August 2024 on. "We await a new appointment from the First Nation's Council," Davison wrote in May 2025. In June 2025 the commission went to Lheidli T'enneh Council to ask for a new contact.

Mayor Simon Yu then offered to act as liaison, and that November Davison and vice-chair Ayesha Rogers met him to ask about suitable wording for the signs. That added a layer rather than a link. No representative was named until August 20, 2026, when Lheidli T'enneh designated Les Baker, an Elder, artist and Land Guardian — fourteen months after the commission asked. "We've wanted the input of the Lheidli T'enneh for years now," Davison told the Prince George Citizen after the September meeting.

The commission's 2023 proposal had planned for a Lheidli T'enneh seat on a design team, alongside city staff, the library, the Exploration Place and Tourism PG. That team was never formed. When a representative finally came, it was through the First Nation's own council, with no formal city channel built to match. The delay now runs to at least December 10, assuming Lheidli T'enneh asks for no significant changes.

Why it matters - Everything in this article comes from the public record: minutes, staff reports, working group reports and news coverage. Three years of back and forth between the Heritage Commission, city staff and council have produced a trail of documents that is hard to untangle into a clear timeline. The public should be able to follow a city project from the record alone. When that is difficult or the record is silent, that is itself a failing.

What the record does show is a volunteer commission carrying a three-year project on its own time, a staff structure that described the coordination gap in writing and then advised against fixing it, a council that has largely followed staff advice despite some councillors' efforts to back the commission, and a project that depended on Lheidli T'enneh input with no formal city channel to secure it.

It has also cost money. By the city's own estimate, replacing all signs rose from about $83,000 in 2023 to about $107,000 in 2025 — roughly $24,000 more for the same work, and likely to rise again. That is before counting staff and council time, and the volunteer hours poured into a project that will be years behind schedule by the time the first sign goes up.

The fix need not be complicated. The commission's 2023 proposal called for a design team with city staff and Lheidli T'enneh at the table from the start, and for the city to manage the project. Forming that team now, with agreed timelines with Lheidli T'enneh, firm deadlines for city departments and other partners, and a short, running public update that records each delay and the reason for it, would let residents see who is dragging their heels.

With municipal elections this fall, voters may want to know where candidates stand on the project. Otherwise another three years will pass, at further cost to taxpayers and to the time of volunteers and partners alike.