Owen Sound’s Regional Rec Centre at Victoria Park will be open for business several months earlier than planned.
The 38.6 million dollar facility will not be entirely complete until the spring of 2012, and an official opening won’t take place until then.
But Mayor Deb Haswell tells Bayshore Broadcasting News the arena portion of the Rec Centre will be open before the end of this year.
She says Brad McRoberts, the city’s manager of special projects, has revealed that the twin-pad arena is scheduled to be operational sometime in November.
The aquatic and fitness portions of the facility will not be finished until the following spring.
The entire rec centre was originally supposed to be completed by this coming spring but delays pushed things back a year and put some of the potential funding in jeopardy for a period of time.
But the federal government’s economic stimulus plan has been extended, and projects that were to have been finished by the end of March now have until the end of October to spend all the allotted money.
That should be no problem for the rec centre, even though all the necessary work won’t be finished until next year.
Local fundraising initiatives are continuing and Haswell says the committee that aims to raise 5 million dollars toward the cost of the rec centre will be making some more big announcements very soon.
The mayor says her phone at City Hall has been “ringing off the hook” with various corporations wanting to be involved in the project.
And Haswell says the rec centre steering committee is considering a number of options related to the existing Coliseum, also located at Victoria Park.
