‘This does not mean we just throw the Wildcat Café away’

Yellowknife deputy mayor Rob Warburton voted to spend nearly $600,000 on new steps at Pilots’ Monument and wants City Hall to consider selling the Wildcat Café.

Now, he wants to talk about those things.

During budget talks at the start of December, Warburton brought forward a motion asking city staff to look at ways City Hall could dispose of the Wildcat Café, a heritage building the municipality has owned for decades.

The cost of maintaining the café has risen sharply and in its current form, it can only be operated in summer.

Warburton thinks someone else might be able to do a better job and the city might be better off without it on the books. The same applies, he argues, to the city-owned Mine Training Building downtown.

Meanwhile, Warburton defended voting to support the “egregiously overpriced set of stairs” to Pilots’ Monument.

The steps up to the tourist attraction, with its views of Yellowknife, were damaged in the summer. A subsequent inspection revealed more work that needed doing. The city says the full cost of the project includes an accessible route to ensure everyone can enjoy the scenery, but some councillors felt the $560,000 quote for the work was untethered from reality.

“Admin got the message that it needs to be rescoped and a sane number needs to be come to but, if we didn’t approve it, it wouldn’t be there for them to even look at,” Warburton said.

“That’s why I begrudgingly supported that one. I suspect you’ll see something come back that is a little tamer on the budget side.”

Below, read our full conversation with the deputy mayor about how the city plans for its facilities and why some line items in each budget matter to him more than others.

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This interview was recorded on December 9, 2025. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Ollie Williams: What did you want to look at here, and why?

Rob Warburton: During the budget, I brought forth a couple of motions: one on the Mine Training Building – which, if folks don’t know, that’s where Home Base has their youth centre right beside Overlander Sports – and the other one was the Wildcat.

We keep expanding and acquiring facilities and there’s no real conversation about, as we grow, do these fit what the city should be doing?

An example is the pool – $70-odd million to build and $5 million a year to run. I would argue that’s our core business. So I just wanted to have a fresh look at those facilities and see if there are other uses, ways we could have other folks use those.

And also to crack the ice, right? To get people’s brains thinking about: the city doesn’t need to own and operate everything forever. We can look at other options.

Spending on the Wildcat Café has gone up significantly: a budget of around $20,000 a couple of years ago to $190,000 now. What’s your sense of what is going on with that building?

When it was first renovated 15 years ago, for reasons that are elusive to everyone at the moment, it was not renovated to be a year-round facility. So now it’s seasonal, hence why it makes so little money. It’s really hard to have a viable business when you only run it three months, four months a year.

What you’re seeing now is the city starting to actually assess and understand what it takes to maintain a building. That number is a huge jump, but that is more accurate of the actual cost of maintaining and running something. So it’s a shocking number. It’s big, but it’s more reflective of what we’re doing.

The reason I brought the Wildcat forward was – and it was amended last night at council to be like, “look at options” –

Let me just unpack that for people listening. Last week, you brought forward a motion saying we should look at divesting this. In other words, getting rid of it. It was amended on Monday night to read, essentially, “let’s look at all the options including divesting it.” I would say that dialled the motion back slightly.

It made people nervous to say “get rid of.” Maybe, in the end, that’s not what we do. I was supportive of that.

The idea was, let’s look at other things we can do with it. And this does not mean just throw it away or give it away. We could do a million things to this. We could make it all-season and then sell it. We could give it to a non-profit. This is why I put it back to administration, to see what the options are.

Budget time is always interesting. A figure that jumped out to a lot of residents last week was spending nearly $600,000 on the steps up to Pilots’ Monument. To be clear, that is a bigger project than it necessarily sounds, in the sense that it’s not only replacing the steps but it’s also creating an accessible means of getting up there. It is a lot of money. And when we’re not sure about $190,000 on the Wildcat, but nearly $600,000 on the steps we were good with… talk me through that.

It’s a great question. There’s two separate things to talk about. One is an operating cost and one is a capital cost.

So the stairs – that egregiously overpriced set of stairs – here’s the reason I supported it.

Admin got the message that it needs to be rescoped and a sane number needs to be come to but, if we didn’t approve it, it wouldn’t be there for them to even look at. That’s why I begrudgingly supported that one. I suspect you’ll see something come back that is a little tamer on the budget side.

But capital, ironically, is not as hard to get. It’s a one-time number, you can go to all kinds of grants and funds for those things. Operations are almost exclusively on taxpayers to run.

So when I talk about $190,000 at the Wildcat, that’s operations money. That’s taxpayer cash. Whereas the stairs, you might apply for accessibility funds and federal grants and those kind of things.

Those numbers are not the same to me. The reason I pushed for the facilities to get looked at is because those costs are forever costs.

And you made this point during budget deliberations about the new pool.

I was in Yellowknife when we voted for it. I voted for it, for the new pool. It was all a capital conversation. We now pay just north of $5 million a year to run this pool. Millions and millions of dollars more per year forever, or until we don’t use it any more.

That needs to be more of the conversation, that cost, because that just keeps going up and up and up. It doesn’t go away. It’s easy to make the decision to do a facility, but then how many millions does that cost to run?

There’ll be a municipal election in the fall next year. Are you already starting to think about what the next council is going to need to think of as its priorities?

Ironically, I think the focus of the last election is still even more a focus now. We still don’t have a very fast land process.

With no land, we can’t build housing. We can’t build businesses. We can’t do anything without land, and the current process is just too slow. The GNWT is not responding quick enough, and we are advocating really hard for them to respond.

We’ve got pressures like the Arctic Security Corridor, we’ve got DND [the Department of National Defence] at the airport, there are all kinds of things coming down the pipe which are going to necessitate much more rapid changes of land tenure. That’s a big one.

And the housing front? There’s been a lot of stuff built in town but the vacancy rate still hasn’t moved. So we need more.

There’s a little bit of doom and gloom with mines closing, and that’s real, but it doesn’t change the fact that these things need to keep going. We can’t take our foot off the gas when it comes to land and the housing side.

I don’t suspect the next council will be particularly hands-off on that one, either, because the pressure is just so high on that.

We’re just under a year to the election, I can just about justify starting to ask this sort of question: the mayor has said he doesn’t want to run again. How do you feel about going for that job?

I will run for council again next year. I am not interested in running for mayor.

I have a full-time job I love and I like the fact that council is part-time. I can still have that input and that effect, but still can do my day job, which is building housing.