Town council has decided that only skating and hockey will be permitted in the rink arena at the Broda Sportsplex.
At its regular meeting of January 30, council agreed that due to the fragile nature of the ice arena surface, the skating rink area will no longer be available for purposes other than ice-related events.
That means that, if and until renovations are undertaken, the arena can no longer accommodate such events as the annual Kamsack Indoor Rodeo, normally held at the end of September.
Events that had been held on the arena floor in the past, including trade shows, boxing matches, reunions and flower shows, are no longer permitted on the floor because of recent fire regulations, said Mayor Nancy Brunt.
In October when he was still working on repairing the rink for its winter opening, Kev Sumner, Kamsack’s recreation director said that he had to delay the start of the winter season because of excessive leaks discovered in the refrigerated pipes embedded in the concrete floor of the hockey arena.
Although the curling arena was not affected, Sumner said that the building is more than 40 years old and between 10 and 15 of the 250 refrigerated methanol tubes in the concrete were causing problems with leakages.
Over the years, the building has been upgraded and maybe the time has come to focus more on the rink’s infrastructure, he said, adding that a product called Rink Seal Pro was ordered which guaranteed a temporary fix.
After the stopgap solution was introduced to the lines, in subsequent years other maintenance solutions are available but they, too, are a temporary fix.
These solutions are expensive and the community will probably want to make a more permanent fix to the problem, he said, explaining that other rinks in Saskatchewan of a similar age as is Kamsack’s have had similar problems.
A permanent solution might be to replace the concrete floor and the pipes embedded in the concrete with either another concrete floor or with a sand floor like the curling rink has, but a sand floor would limit the types of activities that might be held in the arena, he said.
Costs of replacing the concrete floor are estimated to be between $300,000 and $500,000, depending on whether it is decided to replace the concrete with sand, thereby limiting its non-ice use, or replacing the concrete, Brunt said last week. “We’re checking into the prices.”
Either way, it’s a lot of money, Brunt said, adding that council wants to be fiscally accountable and does not want to rush into any decisions.
Brunt said that it would probably not be until at least next year that work would be done on the facility, be it with a sand or concrete floor.
