Dance partners lined up to build Cambridge’s sportsplexes

CAMBRIDGE — Five potential partners are in the mix to help Cambridge build a pair of sportsplexes — one for skates and sneakers and another for swim trunks and goggles.

Conestoga College, Morguard Real Estate, Buckingham Sports Properties, the YMCAs of Cambridge & Kitchener-Waterloo, and Nustadia Recreation of Hamilton all submitted expressions of interest to the city by this week’s deadline.

Morguard owns the Cambridge Centre mall, where an abandoned Sears outlet sits as a possible future location for rinks and gyms. Buckingham runs Cambridge Sports Park, which may want to add to its two 20-year-old ice sheets on Franklin Boulevard.

The Y has its Chaplin Family facility and pool on Hespeler Road, built two decades ago with $1 million in help from the city. But whether it is aquatics or ice or both doesn’t matter. The Y has interest in partnering with the city wherever it might fit.

“We didn’t get into specifics,” said Peter Sweeney, CEO of the local Ys. “We just wanted to make sure that, formally, we were expressing an interest.”

And Conestoga College? Yes, the long-term land-for-lease possibility on the college’s Cambridge campus appears to still be a viable option, for rinks or aquatics.

A public outcry killed a readyto-sign deal for the city to build a multiplex with rinks, gyms and pools on that leased college site. Critics deemed it the next best thing to building in Kitchener.

But that rancour hasn’t embittered the college into angrily taking its ball and bat and property — once owned by the city — and going home.

The all-in-one multiplex, pegged at $80 million, is dead.

Multiple sportsplexes are all the rage now. But Conestoga remains a patient player. “I can confirm that Conestoga did make a submission,” said an email from college spokesperson Brenda Cassidy on Friday.

You want more details? Sorry, the city asked they be kept quiet, as staff assess the submissions and prepares for a Dec. 4 report to city council.

The same is true for Morguard, which owns the centrally-located mall, at the centre of the most politically agreeable site option for the city.

The city says not to talk, a spokesperson said.

But the mall is a prime spot to solve the ongoing ice crisis for a city leaning heavily on an embarrassing handful of aging hockey arenas long past their prime.

“The mall would be a really, really good fit,” said Ed Pavao, vice-president of business development for Nustadia, the developer-operator whose interest in partnering with the city is not attached to any slab of property it owns.

“It would bring a lot of benefits to both the commercial mall and the city. Because you bring people to their site, and retail is kind of hurting so — and they pay taxes. So anything a municipality can do to assist with retail for a mall like that would be a real benefit to everybody.”

While the other four suitors have been orbiting Cambridge’s multiplex saga for some time, Nustadia is new to the city’s dizzying sportsplex soap opera.

“We were kind of keeping an eye on it,” Pavao said.

A few years ago, he said, Cambridge politicians visited the Nustadia-run Mohawk 4-Ice Centre in Hamilton. The Steel City wanted an arena with no impact on the tax base.

“We put a model in place that did that,” Pavao said of the four-rink complex built in 2005.

“The arena actually makes a little bit of money, which is kind of unheard of for a municipal arena,” he said.

Nustadia had done quite a few four-pad arenas in partnership with municipalities, Pavao said. Development expertise and financing models is what it potentially brings to Cambridge’s political sportsplex rodeo.

“We have various options,” Pavao said. “In Moncton, we set up a not-for-profit corporation and they actually ran the arena on behalf of the municipality. There’s all sorts of different models and every community is a little bit different.” Guelph was a little bit different, too. Nustadia built and ran the Guelph Sports and Entertainment Centre — now the Sleeman Centre — in 2000. Five years later, Nustadia handed over the keys to the Guelph Storm home rink to the city, exercising a walkaway clause in the original agreement.

The city, which originally had committed $10 million for a rink, was left holding the bag for the full $21.5-million construction cost. In 2010, it was expected taxpayers would eventually pay $48 million for the facility.

Nustadia’s reputation, company officials admitted, took a beating after pulling out of Guelph in 2005. Nustadia’s parent company said it lost about $1 million in Guelph.

“That was a little outside our typical model, because that’s a spectator building,” Pavao said. “Most of our work has been community arenas.”

Cambridge wants community arenas, and gyms and pools.

“There’s a lot of benefits to combining everything,” Pavao said.