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Saskatoon’s mayor says he’d like to see the city select a location for a downtown arena by the end of the year.
“We have a tremendous opportunity because we already have a strong downtown but we can make it even better,” Mayor Charlie Clark said Tuesday morning on the Brent Loucks Show.
Clark said he’d like to see council get a site picked for a combination arena and convention centre to replace the aging SaskTel Centre and TCU Place buildings, with the goal of making the new building the centrepiece for a new entertainment district.
“It’s not just for an arena. It’s for a district,” he said. “It’s for an area that’ll have restaurants, that’ll have new buildings, hopefully more residential, more people living downtown.”
He noted planning for the future of downtown Saskatoon would also include a new central library and the addition of a bus rapid-transit system.
“We’re not going to build all these things at once, but we can put a vision together of how to put all those things in place so that the downtown is a hub of activity, it’s vibrant,” Clark said.
There isn’t a timeline for when a new arena might be built.
So far, Saskatoon city council has voted in November 2018 to direct administration to factor a new facility into future downtown planning.
The November council vote came after the boards in charge of TCU Place and the SaskTel Centre commissioned a private sector company to do a study on what to do as the buildings start to show their age. City administration subsequently reviewed the study and agreed with the recommendation for a new facility in the downtown core.
The study estimated a replacement arena and convention centre would cost between $330 million and $375 million.
TCU Place was built in 1968 and then renovated extensively in the early 2000s. SaskTel Centre was built in 1988.
