Taken over

The city has moved to take control of the Thunder Bay Regional Protective and Emergency Services Training Centre.

The city gave the not-for-profit organization a loan of $572,040 back in 2008 but officials with the facility had asked that loan be forgiven. The majority of council voted in favour of forgiving that loan but in exchange, the title to the training centre will revert to the city.
The city will take on all responsibilities for the training centre including management and operations starting in the New Year.

The news came as a shock to Larry Price, president of TBRPESTC.

The organization has asked for additional funding of $624,000 to contribute to the construction of an indoor shooting range. Council declined that request. Price said they don’t know if they can even build the shooting range now.

“Also at risk is the children’s safety village and the academic site, which we have been planning for,” Price said. “My concern was the lack of communication with administration. All of a sudden, this was sprung on us and how do you deal with something like that? I would have liked to have meetings to discuss things.”

He said they raised $4.4 million for the first phase of the project and the operating costs have been developing. The centre has obtained a number of contracts and they have been covering the operating costs.

The report and numbers that council was looking at were based in 2011 but didn’t include a major contract that was reached later in the year.

Price didn’t know what was going into the report but argued by 2012, financially, the centre should have been doing just fine.

“There’s no doubt we’ll need to have a board meeting,” he said. “We have signed contracts for over a million dollars for the next phase of the project. We haven’t talked to the funders about this so we will have to take it from there.”

He added that there was no way the city would have won the 2016 Can-Am Police-Fire Games without the training centre’s fire site.

City community services manager Greg Alexander had called the centre’s financial situation muddied during the meeting. He explained the reason for that was that both the board and the city were bringing in revenue.

“The method of how it was coming in and being tracked was a bit convoluted,” he said.

“It was hard to know what was going on from a simple point of view. That’s why we called in the audit to get a real crystal clear view of how the finances were working. It was clear that over the last three years this operation was losing money. There was no contribution to the debt or the interest. Most worrying from our point of view was there was no contribution to the capital reserve fund.”

The centre ran a deficit of about $18,000 in 2010. Alexander admitted that it isn’t a lot of money but taking into consideration that the debt was being paid as well as no contributions being made to the capital reserve fund, the sum begins to grow bigger.

He said he first plans to meet with the board and talk about council’s decision. He went on to say the Thunder Bay Fire and Rescue chief will now handle the centre including operations and future upgrading.

“If the city was going to put in resources we may as well be running the facility,” he said. “I’m reassured by the fire chief that there’s enough interest in this facility that we can break even.”

He went on to say that the indoor gun range wouldn’t happen because there wasn’t enough interest from the public.