Thank you. It's good to hear your voice again. I remember when we talked to you; it was on the same day that we talked to Tommy Banks.
Tommy Banks was a good friend to us. In our initial stages, he said to us that in Alberta you can get a loan through the bank for anything if it's for a field full of pipe, but it's hard to get a play funded. You'd be laughed out of the bank.
We started this project in a vacated provincial courthouse. It was a cold call to the province, and the guy was either just about to go on vacation or to retire, but he said yes and we moved in there. We were financially viable in 18 months. That was a location right downtown—if you ever come to Jasper, you're all invited to come see us—where people can access the centre. After 18 months, we proved ourselves financially viable, and that got the attention of the municipal government.
Jasper was about to revamp our municipal library, so they invited us to come in and sit down with the architects to help design and build Jasper's first dedicated and purpose-built centre for arts and culture. We sat down with them. There were some construction delays. We lost a little momentum in the four years while we were waiting for the centre to open. We also lost about $20,000, because we were going to be a featured site of Alberta Culture Days. When the centre opened, they were going to come and shine the spotlight on us.
We have since opened the centre, and we are blessed enough to have a green space right out in front of the centre. We have about 2,000 square feet of space. We are still accessible. We are still able to have people access us and we're more or less in the downtown. The challenges we have are, first, that this has never been done before, and, second, the astronomical rents in Jasper, which has only been a town for 18 years. This means that we have quite a responsibility to the municipality to make this swing.
As to something the government could do to help us, in Lethbridge there is a arts centre, Casa, and the operating costs and rents are paid through the department of culture. For us in the town of Jasper, it would be good to have something to cover those costs, as well as to make it possible for us to pay administrative costs. It's the edifice complex, where we build the buildings and then no one wants to pay for the cleaning or their operation. If there's any assistance we need, it would be for the day-to-day costs of running the centre, as well as perhaps a living wage for the operation, the programming, the maintaining of events, and the planning of curriculum, and also for just keeping the doors open. That's our major financial challenge. We believe in this enough that we sacrifice to make it happen, but these things I've mentioned would be the greatest alleviations we could have.
Does that begin to answer your question?