City defends cost of soccer complex
Expert calls project price ‘excessive’
The administration of Mayor Denis Coderre is defending the hefty price tag of the city’s new indoor soccer centre, even if it’s the most expensive of its kind in the world.
“I don’t know if it is the most expensive in the world, but what I do know is it will be the most spectacular,” city executive committee member Dimitrios Jim Beis said Wednesday.
He was reacting to criticism by a sport facility expert in Wednesday’s Gazette that the facility the city is building at the Complexe environnemental de St-Michel at Papineau Ave. and Louvain St. is the most expensive indoor soccer facility anywhere.
Larry Eldridge, a consultant who has 30 years of experience in building soccer centres and other sport facilities in Quebec, Canada and abroad, also told The Gazette that the city should have built three to four indoor soccer centres for less than the cost of the one that is under construction. One centre won’t fulfill the needs of the 40,000 players registered with local soccer federations, he said. The centre or centres also could have been conceived to serve other activities simultaneously, such as Ultimate Frisbee and wall climbing, he said.
The construction cost of the Montreal soccer centre has doubled since 2011. The rules for the design competition for the centre at the time set the budget at $24 million. The administration of former mayor Gérald Tremblay then announced the price at $28.3 million.
A civil service report accompanying the latest contract for field turf, awarded earlier in June, shows the major contracts awarded for the construction tally $56.9 million. The list doesn’t include road infrastructure and a series of smaller contracts that have been awarded by civil servants for work related to the centre in recent months.
However, an aide to Beis said the cost is “only” $50 million, and not nearly $60 million. That’s because the cost of an $8-million roof contract awarded last year was integrated into the cost of the centre’s construction contract, aide Sabrina Williams wrote in an email.
But whether it costs $50 million or $60 million, Eldridge maintains the city’s new facility is the most expensive of its kind in the world. “It’s excessive,” he said. Civil service documents on the soccer project offer no final estimated price for the project, which is expected to open in December.
Some of the work that is not included in the administration’s $50-million estimate is one-quarter of a $2.94-million road and water network contract was for the soccer centre.
Beis acknowledged on Wednesday that “there are some fees and costs that are apart from the $50 million.”
He added that the Tremblay administration’s decision to hold a design competition was the probable cause of the price explosion.
“There are a number of positive points to this facility, but these decisions were taken by the previous administration,” he said. “We believe enough in the project to see that it be finished and open to the public.”
Meanwhile, Beis said he didn’t yet have a response from civil servants to Eldridge’s specific criticisms about the $1.5-million contract for synthetic turf, awarded by city council on a jury’s recommendation earlier in June.
Beis also called the soccer centre a way of giving back to the St-Michel neighbourhood, which was scarred for decades by the quarry-turned-municipal landfill that existed before the Complexe environnemental de StMichel. The city closed most of the waste dump in the 1990s and has been transforming it into a metropolitan park.
“The public has been waiting more than a decade (for the soccer centre),” Beis said. “Is it a lot of money? Yes, it is. But it’s something we’ll be proud of in the end.”