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The old brown barn near the gates of Hawrelak Park doesn’t look worth fighting over.

For more than 30 years, the Edmonton Heritage Festival has used the barn to house the equipment for its massive summer celebration of multiculturalism. This is where the festival stored its tents, its flags, its ticket booths, its water barrels, its picnic tables, its electrical plugs, its hoses, its deep-fat fryers.

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Now, the city has told the festival it must vacate the site — in two weeks.

“We are indeed being forced out of our facility,” Jim Gibbon, the festival’s executive director, told me Wednesday.

“We are saddened because we built it for ourselves in 1986, the same year we built the Heritage Amphitheatre for the people of the City of Edmonton and it has been the base of operations for the Edmonton Heritage Festival for 32 years.”

Last week, they were ordered to move out of the barn by Aug. 21.

“We have tried for two years to convince the city to let us keep our building — which, to reiterate, we built and paid for — but they sent us a final eviction notice for removal from our site,” Gibbon said.