Saskatoon city council will vote on the location of the proposed downtown entertainment district on Wednesday afternoon.
Site A is the parking lot north of Midtown, while Site B is the city yards lot next to the police station.
“With that decided, we can actually start work developing out some of the conceptual designs for the district, which will help inform what our budget will need to be,” said City of Saskatoon director of technical services Dan Willems.
“Our funding plan work is in development. So ultimately, our funding plan needs to match our technical budget for what we want to build.”
A City of Saskatoon report, which included results from a public engagement survey, detailed costs behind Site A which weren’t previously released to the public.
Purchasing the lot from Midtown would come with a price tag of $25 million while neighbouring properties would cost $17.3 million.
The city would also be on the hook for relocating the 526 parking stalls and establishing new parking facilities for Midtown, at an approximate cost of $25 million.
“Under the terms of our agreement with the Midtown, we were unable to disclose any of the terms of the agreement until the agreement came forward to city council for approval,” said Willems.
The city’s report released in August said the conditional agreement for the purchase of Site A would be brought forward for City Council’s approval at a November meeting and would include conditions around relocating and establishing parking at a cost expected to exceed $10 million.
“If we had gone in and engaged on-site options before having that land secured, we would be at a severe disadvantage in negotiation,” said Willems.
“Similar to that we were trying with some of the adjacent properties we are pursuing, trying to get the largest canvass possible, the areas that we think we may ultimately need under the logic that if we don't need it later, we can dispose of those properties.”
Willems says Site B would be even more expensive.
“It's not a vacant site. It's an active area of our civic operations. The roadways and water and sewer crews all operate out of those areas,” he said.
“To relocate those is an extremely costly investment for the city, and while it is ultimately a plan for us to eventually move out of that area, that investment is massive, upwards of, depending on how much area is displaced anywhere from 100 to 200 million plus.”
He says disclosing the dollar amounts to the public during the public engagement process would not have changed the results, as the goal was to consult perceived opportunities and challenges of both sites and not to choose between the two.
“We did see a common theme around concerns about parking and traffic congestion and that sort of thing,” said Willems.
“Not really surprising, obviously something we need to take careful consideration of as we move to next steps in the in the design phases or conceptual design phases.”
Pending council’s decision on Wednesday, Willems says there will be additional decisions to confirm a funding strategy, including a potential refurbishment of TCU Place or a new convention centre.
“There's a lot of things that need to happen over the next year and beyond before we're at a point where we're ready to start detailed design and construction of an arena,” he said.
