Lakers, Petes consider options

City staff to meet with teams Tuesday to go over challenges posed by 2018 Memorial Centre repairs

City staff will meet with the Peterborough Lakers and Petes Tuesday to discuss options regarding 2018 Memorial Centre floor repairs.

Community services director Ken Doherty said the city is open to suggestions.

On Monday, city council heard a report from staff that calls for the PMC floor and refrigeration pipes to be replaced in 2018. The work would take 3 1/2 months, between mid-May and August, and close the arena to all activity on the playing surface.

The senior Lakers have suggested they might have to fold for the season since the loss of gate and sponsor revenues expected if they had to play out of town would be financially onerous.

“The intent of the meeting is to go over the documentation and go over in detail the challenges,” Doherty said. “We will be talking about what options should be explored or could be explored.”

The next step would be to explore costs.

Doherty said it’s premature to discuss what options might be viable before meeting with the teams.

“We need to identify realistic options from the two stake-holder organizations,” he said. “Anything above and beyond that right now would be speculation.”

Ideas were floated at city council of playing an outdoor season potentially in the PMC parking lot or on turf fields at Fleming College or Trent University.

“We have not explored any possibilities or costed any possibilities at this point,” Doherty said.

Lakers’ communications director Brian Cowie suggested their board is aware of similar work done at other arenas in a much shorter time frame. They’d like the city to get other opinions.

“I can appreciate the Lakers are trying to find a faster solution,” Doherty said.

“We want to make sure that at the end of the day we get the best job done that we can. I know when we replaced both pads at the Kinsmen we weren’t under the same time constraints but that was a fairly complicated process that took a number of months for each pad.

“The pad at the Memorial Centre is even more complicated in that it’s a pad on top of a pad. I would not want to speculate, and that’s all that this is at this point, that somebody might be able to do it faster.”

If there is no alternative but to play out of town, one way the senior Lakers might be able to survive financially is if the city compensated them for any losses. Doherty did not dismiss the idea.

“The direction we’ve asked from council gives us a lot of latitude,” he said. “What we wanted to do more than anything else was to give as much advance notice as possible so we could look at all options. Compensation would certainly be a possible option.

“I would not want to have a decision about what is done determined prematurely without giving opportunity to explore all possible options.”

The city is looking for council’s approval Monday to move ahead on roof repairs, which will not disrupt use of the arena floor, in May. Doherty said it will take longer to determine a final plan for the floor. The public will have an opportunity to speak Monday.

“It will be council that decides on how we proceed,” Doherty said. Page A1. See related story on