With an aim to open doors on the new centre, situated in the Paradise end of Peel St, by 2023 the committee behind the project are wasting no time on pulling together a plan.

Councillor Glenn Inglis is among those leading the charge as part of the city’s cultural advisory committee and he said a plan was now underway to determine how the council funding would be allocated.

“We got our budget allocated and that was $200,000,” he said.

“Now we have to go off and do our work and come back with a business plan including all the other sorts of requirements for what we want to do.

“We had the Tamworth Regional Arts and Cultural Advisory Committee group meeting last week where we have tabled that information and requested Peter Ross (entertainment venues manager) to come to us with a project management plan to move this project forward.”

Cr Inglis said an artists’ impression on what the new precinct would look like would be some time away with the committee still to finalise what the performing arts centre would include and how big it would be.

“There will be some fairly extensive community and stakeholder consultation – similar to what we did with AELEC to identify the potential users of this over and above the community here,” he said.

“We are talking about specific user groups and we will attempt to identify them and form some sort of reference panel to come up with the specifications of what’s going to be in it.”

Cr Inglis said the ultimate goal was to have the project finished by 2023 when the 15-year lease on the Tamworth Capitol Theatre building comes to an end.

“It sounds like a long way into the future but it really isn’t,” he said.

“We also want it to be an architectural landmark in the main street and we’ll get the architectural draftings down the track but the first thing is to get an idea of what the specifications are going to be on this project.”

“We want to make sure it achieves maximum environment and economic sustainability.” 

Cr Inglis flagged the building could also be used by third parties and potentially universities to deliver music-related courses into the future.

Initial plans for the project were announced by Council in May with plans to include a 600-seat main theatre, 200-seat studio theatre, two rehearsal rooms and a meeting room.

The proposal is part of the region’s draft Keychange 2017-2027 Community Strategic Plan which went on exhibition earlier this year.