St. Bon's a condominium? Private developers circling as committee scrambles to raise money

A committee formed to attempt a purchase the Basilica Cathedral of St. John the Baptist complex in St. John's is scrambling to raise money as private developers snoop around ahead of a crucial bid deadline next week.

The committee comprises the Basilica Heritage Foundation, St. Bonaventure's College and the St. Bon's Forum, and it intends to submit a bid on the so-called Basilica Block. The deadline for bids is Thursday.

"Just the day before yesterday there was a group of Toronto developers came to town and knocked on the door of the school to look around because they have a stated interest of buying it and turning it into condominiums," Rob Blackie, chairman of the St. Bonaventure's College independent school board of governors and a member of the new joint bid committee,told CBC News on Friday.

The committee hopesto purchase the complex and preserve its history, culture and institutions, but Blackieadmitted there's asense of dread and uncertainty about the process.

"Our fear, or our theoretical fear, has sort of manifested itself as being real," Blackie said of the out-of-province developers he said visited the school this week.

"Worst-case scenario is that we fail, and that the Toronto developers who are looking at this end up owning it and turning it into something that it's not."

• Basilica bidders hope to preserve culture, faith amid church bankruptcy

Blackie said the committee has received a broad range of support, from the smallest hand-delivered cash donationsto a person's life savings.

He won't say how much they've raised, or how much they'll bid, because such information would give competing bidders an advantage.But with deep-pocketed developers circling, Blackie said, every possible dollar is needed.

"The major concerns for us is we don't really have a sense of what the scale of competition is. So it's really on us to determine what is the appropriate price and the amount we can raise in a really tight period of time."

But with the possibility of competing bids, and a process that favours those who put the most money on the table, Blackie said it's possibleone of this province's most iconic collections of public architecture could end up in private hands.

"We either succeed or we don't, and if we don't it's not just the buildings and the land we run the risk of losing, it's really the institutions that are in the buildings that we fear will be lost in the process," he said.

The archdiocese, previously one of the most powerful and influential institutions in the province, is liquidating all its assets including churches, parish halls andrectories under a court-supervised insolvency process. It's part of an effort by the archdiocese to raise money to compensate dozens of survivors of abuse at the former Mount Cashel orphanage.

It's a process that's open to anyone willing to come up with a 15 per cent down payment,with the full amount due by mid-June.

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador