City received multiple opinions on floor repairs
The lacrosse community wants the City of Peterborough to get a second or third opinion on whether Memorial Centre floor repairs are really necessary next summer.
City staff responded on Friday by stating they feel they’ve already got multiple opinions.
The Peterborough Lakers held a press conference on Wednesday and presented fans with a letter Thursday urging the city to get a second or third opinion. City council has approved a $3.5 million replacement of the PMC floor that will close the arena from June 1 to Nov. 1, 2019, displacing the Lakers for one full season.
The Lakers fear losing their fan base, an average of 3,000 per game, if forced to move to the 800-seat Evinrude Centre or to fold operations for a year.
An engineer’s report in 2016 found cracks in the south wall support under the floor. Further reports indicate the floor at that end is deteriorating.
The Lakers maintain they’ve talked to arena builders and engineers who think the wall can be repaired without replacing the entire floor. Their letter provided fans the names and contact info for city councillors.
“We feel we’ve already had second, third and actually fourth opinions,” said city commissioner of infrastructure Wayne Jackson.
A 2009 report on city buildings identified the PMC floor’s shelf-life as 10 years, Jackson said.
In 2016, an engineer examined the structural integrity of the floor and identified a problem with the south wall. A separate engineer has monitored the floor for the past year and while there are no further cracks in the foundation, Jackson said the floor at that end has deteriorated from a width of eight to four inches.
“We’ve made all this information public,” Jackson said.
“We expect the way it is deteriorating to go much more, much quicker. I’m not sure what additional opinions are going to give us. The one thing we don’t want to do is to delay this so we end up, instead of being proactive, being reactive and we have an emergent situation where we have a collapse and whatever is happening at that time has to stop.
“It’s a lot better to plan for these things than to just wait for it to happen.”
Jackson said the city’s experience with Northcrest Arena illustrated repairs like this cannot be done without replacing the entire floor.
“There are pipes through the floor that create ice and they’ve been there for 30plus years,” said Jackson.
“In Northcrest we tried to connect new pipes to the old existing pipes and you make the new connection and the old pipes crack. You move ahead another foot and make a new connection and it cracks. We actually chased these cracks all the way across the floor. We know, and our structural engineers know, that’s the situation,” he said.
City council will address the issue again on Sept. 10. Jackson said staff recommendations won’t change.
“We’ve been discussing the necessity of this and the timing of this with all the stakeholders for some length of time,” said Jackson.
He said city staff take no offence to the pressure the Lakers are trying to apply to avoid the repairs.
“We understand the concern. We are from Peterborough. We go to Laker games and cheer them on. We go to Petes’ games,” Jackson said.
“There are a number of stakeholders and people who use this. This is a community facility. We understand that. The one thing we don’t want to happen is this thing becomes an emergency.
“From our experience emergencies take longer and cost more than any sort of planned work. We’re trying to do the best in terms of maintaining our facilities so we’re going ahead with this.”