REGINA - It was a familiar story for Regina Exhibition Association Ltd. at Regina City Hall on Wednesday, as they were back with another request for money.
This time REAL officials including acting CEO Roberta Engel, board chair Niki Anderson and Charlene Callander, Interim Board Member, made a request for an additional operating grant of $4 million to pay down their line of credit. The recommendation that came from administration was for it to be funded out of the General Fund Reserve and paid before the end of October 2024.
The indication from REAL was that the amount would allow it to operate within its current line of credit limit to March 2025. Engel said it would create some more room on their operating line to while they work through finalizing their operating budget with the interim board.
Engel outlined the consequences if council said no to the funding.
She said the Executive team has “started to resurrect our decommissioning strategy that we used as part of the pandemic. We may find ourselves in a position to follow similar suit.”
REAL had seen some well-publicized financial struggles over the past while, with losses in the millions. Last year REAL went to council to ask for and be approved to acquire $3.4 million in debt in order to keep going.
A report in November 2023 from consulting firm MNP stated REAL was not financially self sufficient and would continue to lose money for years.
On Wednesday, Executive Committee voted in favor of the request for $4 million, which will now head to city council Sept. 25. But it was not before some pointed questions at the meeting from Mayor Sandra Masters about why the ask was now up to $4 million when the original budget request last year had been for $2.9 million.
She indicated to reporters afterwards that she didn’t feel she got a sense of why that happened. Masters cited that as one reason why she ended up being one of the two votes against the $4 million ask, but the other was that she thought it was a short term fix.
“It's one more short term solution as opposed to the plan that was asked for over a year ago now, which was to figure out what restructuring needs to happen so that they can operate within the line of credit on their operations,” said Masters.
When asked about what she thought the long term solution would be, Masters responded “that’s kind of what I was hoping for a year and a half ago.”
“Honestly, I do think it’s about getting right with both of the COVID debt as well as the capital assets and how they’re held and how they’re funded... anything that’s ofsignificant capital investment that has to come from the city’s capital program because they’re city assets.”
The REAL operating grant issue now will go to city council again next week for more discussion and approval.
