City insists arena project stays on budget

City Councillor Patrick Martin: Determined to deliver the new arena on budget.

Published on February 23, 2011

Elisabeth Faure

As part of the Examiner’s series on the city’s arena/pool project, this week’s piece looks at the project’s financing. Some citizens are concerned about the project’s costs — but Mayor Peter Trent has promised it will not go over budget.

Topics :

Westmount , Melville Avenue , Victoria Avenue

The planned arena/pool renovation is currently budgeted at $37 million, with $20 million of that amount coming from twin federal and provincial grants of $10 million each.

Mayor Peter Trent has high praise for his predecessor, Karin Marks, who secured the grants, “by dint of incredible perseverance.” Trent has called the grants Marks’s “crowning achievement.”

Melville Avenue resident Patrick Barnard — a vocal opponent of the project who has criticized it at council meetings, in letters to newspapers and in a series of YouTube videos — questions the size of the grants.

“A grant of that kind is practically unheard of, especially for a city as rich as Westmount,” says Barnard.

Securing the grants was an expensive process. The city paid $22,773.75 to the National Public Relations firm to work on the file.

Barnard questions the payments to National. He obtained a copy of the city’s bill through an access to information request. Six of the eight billing items are labeled, “relations gouvernementales.”

“No lobbyist is registered ... as having worked for Westmount in 2009,” Barnard notes.

Roch Landriault, National’s vice-president of media relations, says that initially there was a question of his company lobbying the government on Westmount’s behalf, but this was quickly dropped. “Right out of the first meeting, it came out that the mayor had all the contacts she needed to do government relations, so we wouldn’t have to be involved in this,” he says, adding that National never registered as a lobbyist because the firm's involvement in government relations was limited to research, advice, and paperwork.

Brigitte Stock, head of communications for the City of Westmount, concurs with Landriault.

The City hopes to offset a possible $17 million cost to taxpayers by raising $5 million in private donations. But Victoria Avenue resident Anne Monty is still worried. “We’ll be paying for this for the rest of our lives,” she says.

The money paid to help secure the grant is only part of what has been spent so far on the project. Stock confirms the City spent more than $20,000 on a 2010 household mailer asking residents to support the project, more than $14,000 on a “needs survey” to examine what kind of arena would best suit the city, and more than $1.3 million on various plans for the arena (the current design is the third one).

With construction on the project set to start this fall, Barnard worries about staying on-budget.

He cites a 2007 Westmount application for government money, showing the project budgeted at $26.4 million in total. “What I believe this means is ... this is a project that is escalating,” he says.

Barnard’s fears are groundless, says City Councillor Patrick Martin.

Martin agrees that budgets for the arena go back for a decade, but says the present plan (which he supports) has only increased by $1 million since the last plan under the previous council (which he did not support). The extra $1 million can be attributed to cost for moving the arena's two hockey rinks underground, and inflation.

“This Council and this project team are determined to bring the project in on budget, and we will do so,” Martin says. “We are constantly holding the design team to this budget, and bringing in whatever expertise is required to give effect to this firm objective.”