MARATHON — Construction of an Active Living Centre can commence as soon as funding is clinched, Marathon Mayor Rick Dumas said Friday.
And the multi-purpose facility’s construction is vitally important as the clock ticks down on the municipal arena’s operating life, he added.
Dumas said CIMCO Refrigeration, the company the maintains the ice-making system at the Marathon Arena, has told the municipality the system has two or three years left in it.
A shutdown of the arena would mean no indoor rink as well as no indoor pool in Marathon, since the pool was closed permanently in 2023.
“We’ll have to do something,” Dumas stated.
The estimated cost of bringing the lakeside town’s existing recreation complex “up to code and up to speed” is more than $50 million, he said.
At that price, he said, renovation “just does not make sense.”
“So we were saying, ‘Let’s go to government and talk about how we’re going to build this new facility.’"
The proposed 100,000-square-foot Active Living Centre would include a lap pool, a leisure pool, a hockey rink, bowling lanes and exhibit space among its many features.
Space for pickleball, basketball and other activities is allocated for the grounds outside the building.
Dumas said Friday that he and Marathon’s two other delegates to the Aug 17-20 Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference spoke to provincial officials about the project and the town’s requests for funding.
He added that local MP and cabinet minister Patty Hajdu arranged a meeting with federal Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson for the Marathon team.
Funding decisions could be made at the federal and provincial levels in the next few months, Dumas said.
A main contractor has been found to construct the centre at a cost of $83 million and “we have a fully detailed plan,” he said.
“We just need assistance from our — I call them our parents and our grandparents — the provincial and federal governments to make this happen.”
Dumas said he knows the higher governments may not have Marathon’s issues top of mind, because “there are 444 municipalities in Ontario and there’s over 5,000 in Canada, and everybody has issues with recreation and recreation builds.”
But, he said, “we believe our project is front-running (because) we’re tender-ready. We’ve gone to tender. Our design is done, our engineering — everything is done 100 per cent. As soon as we get the announcement of funding, we can start building the project.”
A local arena-pool complex is “the hub of the community for health and well-being” in many communities, he said.
“We’re a community that was able to have a pool since the early 1970s. We want to continue that. It brings a lot of health and well-being.
“And we’re also one of the few, if not only, communities that we know of in Canada that has received contributions from our First Nations neighbours (for a recreation complex)," Dumas continued.
“Pic River First Nation — Biigtigong Nishnaabeg — has given us $1 million towards the build. Netmizaaggamig, Pic Mobert First Nation, gave us $500,000.
“That’s a very unusual and positive contribution towards the recreation complex and the community of Marathon to show that they support the community but also utilize the facilities, so they want to see the facilities being built.”
Getting the Active Living Centre built and open would be “a win-win-win for everybody,” Dumas said.
“We just need government to say ‘yes, we support Marathon,’ and we need to get those dollars from the federal and provincial governments.”
