On February 4th Vic Fedeli announced East Ferris would receive $548,360 from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC) to help offset the cost of fixing their community centre.
“We were very fortunate to get the funding,” said Mayor Pauline Rochefort. “The funding we received represented approximately 50 per cent of our total expense” on the $1.1 million project.
See: Northern Heritage Funding will boost multiple projects
The need for repairs came as a surprise to council, Mayor Rochefort said. After routine engineering reports to check the structural safety of the building, it was discovered that the roof’s truss system required replacement.
“They basically said that it was no longer a safe roof,” Mayor Rochefort said of the report, and given the “critical” issues, council decided to begin repairs as soon as possible.
See: Arena roof truss upgrades to cost about $1M when all costs included
This past summer, work began to fix the structure. North Bay’s Kenalex Construction was hired for the job, “and they did great work,” the mayor said.
She mentioned fixing the centre was a priority for council, which is why they undertook the project immediately without waiting for any outside funding. They applied for NHOFC funding while the work was underway and receiving it last week “meant a lot to us, and to the community as well.”
The building is “very much rooted in the community,” the mayor emphasized. Although the town contributed to its construction, for the most part “this centre was built by the citizens. The citizens decided they wanted an arena and in 1971 our citizens pooled their money together” to build it.
Over the years the centre has expanded, and now includes a curling club, “a greater hall upstairs” that holds 360 people, a restaurant lounge area, a snack bar, and the post office.
Everything is fixed now, and LED lights have been installed over the ice-surface. Some minor work remains to be done in the kitchen, the mayor said, but everything is close to completion.
“It’s a wonderful facility and it’s important for us that it remains alive and safe for many years to come,” she said, emphasizing “the safety of the community centre is paramount, of course.”
“We were really delighted,” to receive the funding, she said. “It is a major contribution to an asset that’s so important to our municipality.”
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.