Lewis Farms Recreation Centre and District Park Update (February 2021)

Two weeks ago, I mentioned that I made a motion related to the Lewis Farms District Park and Rec Centre that was going to council last week. The following motion was approved unanimously by council:

That Administration issue an Expression of Interest (EOI) to solicit potential interest for external partners interested in any combination of either Financing, Building, and/or Operating/Maintaining any of the planned components of the Lewis Farms District Park and Recreation Facility and return to Committee with an analysis and evaluation of the submissions.

Due Date Q4 2021

Before I get into what this means, I want to provide some history on this project.

In mid-2019, council approved the full budget for the construction of the entire project which also includes the library that will be part of this project. When debating the approval of this project, some members of council mentioned that if there was a significant change to infrastructure funding that we receive from the provincial government, they would have to revisit this.

In late 2019, the provincial government cut our infrastructure funding by approximately $600 million over 10 years with $180 million being cut in the first 2 years of the 10 years. This cut was on top of the approximately 42% funding cut the Edmonton took for infrastructure funding from the previous provincial government. These massive cuts in funding caused council to freeze the construction of this project but did still support completing the design work so this could be shovel-ready if the funding situation changed.

The design work is going to be wrapping up around the end of June this year at which point the project will be shovel-ready. The infrastructure funding cuts have not been replaces and in fact, we are expecting even more cuts in the next provincial budget.

Knowing the huge need that already exists for recreation and library services west of the Henday, I started thinking about different ways that we could try to move this project forward even without the ability for the City to fund the whole project.

The City of Calgary for the last few decades has built many of their recreation facilities by working with non-profit partner agencies. The majority of their rec centres are operated by non-profit partners. Knowing that this model has worked there, I thought that it might be worth exploring this model here in Edmonton considering the new funding constraints we are operating under.

Fortunately, we have heard from partner groups who have expressed an interest in potentially working with the City to move this project forward. That is what led to the motion at the beginning of this post.

This motion doesn't guarantee that a non-profit partner will build and operate this rec centre. What this does is it allows different partner agencies to submit an Expression of Interest (EOI). An EOI is an introductory submission to take the lead on a particular project. It's a tool that municipalities have used in the past to determine if there is interest in solving a particular solution.

I expect there will be submissions as part of this EOI process. Assuming there are submission, the next council in November/December would then have the ability to approve formal negotiations with the partner that provides the best submission.

Although this is new for Edmonton, the fact that this is a more common approach in other municipalities gives me hope that we will find a willing partner and that we can keep this project moving.

I know there are probably a lot of questions and I don't have a lot of answers yet until we see the expressions of interest. There are a few common comments I have heard that I have shared with interested partners. For example, I know a lot of people have asked about the ability to still have a City of Edmonton annual pass and then use that at a partner-run facility. That would be an important consideration.

The other message I have heard regularly is a desire to keep the same programming. I don't want to see us go back to the drawing board to reprogram the building as that would add significant time to a project that will be shovel-read by the end of June.

In constrained financial times, we have to be willing to consider new approaches (or best practices from other cities) to delivering services. If we aren't willing to consider different approaches, we risk putting on hold many of our projects that are critical for residents across the city. This EOI process gives us that path to keep important projects moving forward.

This is one of, if not the most, important project for residents in our developing communities west of the Henday as well as some of the communities west of the inner ring road (170th Street). If you have any questions on this, please let me know.