Transparency... quite a term to use when for almost a decade transparency has has been sorely lacking from our city. A quick breakdown of the facts and timeline. In December of 2022 the turf user groups presented a hanger style facility at the auditorium location for 20 million dollars. After 6 months of review and site checks the city came back with a range of 23.8-25.8 million. Higher than expected but within the range when they added changes to the plan. Then a few months later the price ballooned to over 44 million, with no changes to the building or to the site..... The price almost doubled, but how?
Here is where transparency is lacking. Our tax dollars paid for the city to use an out of province consultant to come up to this outrageous number. Yet we aren't allowed to see how they came back with such a cost... We have to blindly believe those numbers are accurate. Either the city's numbers are way off or the consultants are. Either way we don't know yet, because of no transparency. Here's the catch, we have local developers willing to build this for substantially less. Mark Bentz you stated your upper end limit is 33 million dollars (30 for the building plus 3 million for site services). We have local developers saying that can be done. So let’s allow them to bid on the project as we presented.
Every time there is a delay it only adds to the costs. Attempts to save money have cost us millions. Delays have cost an entire generation to lose out. This project could have been built years ago for far less. Unfortunately due to a lack of transparency we found out after the fact why the costs were so high and kept going up. All of those extra costs didn't come at the request of the user groups...
It’s been stated we are going down the same path. That is not the case. There is another way to go to rfp. That keeps the cost down and designs away from the consultants… Here is the key, let the developers bid on a design build rfp with as little influence from architects and consultants as possible. Ensure no unnecessary extras are added in, ensure no exorbitant costing materials are added to inflate the costs, ensure this goes to design build rfp so the price is the price and won't cost more after its been approved. Going to design build rfp saves the city time and money. The bonus is if the price comes in higher than council feels comfortable with you can work with the developers up to 15% to bring the costs down. The turf users want this to be efficient and as cost effective as possible. Work with us to make that happen. Let our user fees pay for the facility. Let our user fees make it profitable. Let the city benefit from our dollars going back into your investment. Let the tournaments we host bring dollars to our city.
Costs keep getting added in to this project year after year, but they aren't coming from us... It's time to take this out of the hands of consultants and see what local developers will actually build this for. Then and only then, will we have transparency.
This letter was submitted by Soccer Northwest Ontario on behalf of turf user groups:
Thunder Bay Minor Football
Thunder Bay touch football
Thunder Bay Cricket
Ultimate Frisbee
Thunder Bay Chill
Thunder Bay rush
Thunder Bay men’s league
Thunder Bay women’s league
