Supply chain issues for required materials contribute to latest delay

Jasper Aquatic Centre renovations have hit another hurdle and the Municipality of Jasper will have to delay the re-opening of the facility by approximately six weeks.

Unforeseen supply chain issues with the future change room’s partition panels are the cause of the holdup, explained Director of Community Development, Christopher Read, at the Tuesday, June 18, regular council meeting.

“We’re hoping to open by the end of of July with temporary solutions in place,” Read said. 

Councillors reacted to the news that the project would be delayed. Mayor Richard Ireland said finding out about the delays just two weeks out of the target date was “really frustrating,” and asked if the arena was on track to open in time for the winter season.

“The level of disappointment at that stage would be multiple times higher,” Ireland said.

Read said there was no changes to the arena’s construction schedule; the renovations will be done by August and the ice will be in by September, he said. Likewise for the curling rink.

“Right now nothing stands in the way of that schedule,” Read said.

Tour guide

On June 19, Read led Jasper Activity Centre stakeholders around the construction site on a facility tour. The tour was an opportunity to show representatives from local sports clubs, seniors groups, Tourism Jasper and other organizations the progress made on the $20 million renovation.

“Our hope is to also give people a sense of excitement,” Read told about a dozen Jasperites in attendance. “It is ending, it’s getting close, it’s a real project.”

The tour started in the upper curling lounge, where drywalling and rough-ins for mechanical and electrical work are being installed. Accessible washrooms and an elevator will be new features in that space. 

Downstairs in the plaza—the main entryway from Bonhomme Street—Read noted that new concrete will replace the “old, chippy, trippy” rubber matting. The lobby of the Activity Centre will renovated to be a more welcoming and open space.

Elbow room 

A major feature of the renno is the relocation of the arena’s ice plant away from the nearby Wildflowers Early Education Centre. In that space will be a new “lace-up room” for school groups and public skaters. 

The arena’s existing dressing rooms will benefit from the removal and replacement of the building’s outer wall (as part of the project’s arena extension). Furthermore the new, multiple-hockey-bag-wide hallway will be lit naturally by its corridor-running windows, Read pointed out. 

But perhaps the most anticipated component of the arena renovation is the two new modernized dressing rooms. Spacious and bright, the rooms are designed with attracting high-caliber hockey teams in mind, while increasing service levels for all groups. All told, there will be six fully-accessible change rooms and two smaller flexible-use spaces.

“We can now accommodate all kinds of mobility challenges,” Read said.

Pool party

 At the Aquatic Centre, stakeholders were given an exclusive look at the under-construction universal change-rooms—which themselves contain 30 private changing spaces and several “family cabanas”—as well as first-hand information from project leaders as to the reason for the project’s most recent delays. Backlogged partition panels, while inconvenient, pose a significantly less challenging hinderance than finding instance after instance of asbestos-lined walls, Read shrugged.   

“This has been hard, long and painful but it’s going to be beautiful,” he said, pointing out subtle design changes that brings the building up to the standard of modern facilities, including brighter “up-lighting” in the pool area and tweaks to change patrons’ access patterns.

Back Of House

A running theme of the tour was that much of the work since the renovation project began last spring is the type which goes largely unseen to the visiting and recreating public. Standing beside a nondescript electrical transformer on the north side of the facility, Read pressed his point that while the “back of house” improvements are critical to the project’s success, they’re largely unnoticeable to most Jasper Activity Centre users.

“The new electrical room behind this wall feeds the whole project,” he said. “[Building it] takes a lot of time, costs a lost of money and addresses safety concerns in the facility we’ve had for 60 years.”

The municipality’s Chief Administrative Officer, Bill Given, who attended the tour, thanked Carlson Construction for being adaptable over the course of the renovation.

“We’ve had a lot of bumps and challenges along the way but we’ve been blessed with a great construction partner,” Given said. “The municipality has a great professional team on this project, working together and hitting those deadlines to the best of our abilities.”

For the latest on the renovation project, visit the Municipality of Jasper’s website or social media platforms.  

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com