Kin Refurbishing Continues With Little Disruption
Saturday, February 2, 2013 @ 4:13 AM
Prince George, B.C. – The Canada Winter Games of 2015 are about two years down the road, and one of the major projects undertaken by the city in support of that event is about 50% completed.
The $16 million Kin Enhancement Project involves the reconstruction of most of the Kin 1 building as well as enhancements to Kin 2. The Kin 1 work involves enlarging the ice surface to the Olympic standard of 200 feet by 100 feet, improving washrooms, dressing rooms and officials’ rooms, and installing a new roof. Work began at the end of spring 2012 and is to be completed by the end of this October.
Andy Beesley, Manager of CN Centre and Recreational Facilities with the City of Prince George, says the work is being done in phases, and for a particular reason. “Our major concern throughout this project was the fact that our arenas are very well used and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t displace our user groups by being down a rink for an entire year. So Kin 1 has been completely taken apart and is being re-built. Before we started taking apart some of the dressing rooms we made sure that five new dressing rooms were built on the Kin 2 arena. Those are now fully finished, fully operational and user groups are using them” Work is now in progress on the demolition and re-building of the other five dressing rooms.
Beesley says that will complete Phase one of the construction. “Phase two, because it’s the entire Kin 1 arena plus seating and dressing rooms and office space, is a much bigger job. It also includes the lounge that connects the Kin Centres together. That’s being completely refurbished as well. It’s a significant project and there aren’t any phases of that that are going to be finished until the grand re-opening. It all sort of happens at once.” Beesley says pieces of that project, such as the underground work and laying of concrete, has been done “and just over the next week or two we’ll start seeing some of the big steel beams going up so you’ll start to see some shape to the new arena.”
Beesley says up to this point the project is on time and on budget. “Yes, the winter has been kind to the construction crews and overall, the project is looking pretty good to be on schedule. There’s a lot of work to be done, but right now everything is going along as smoothly as possible for such a major and complex project.” He says he hasn’t heard of any problems cropping up over a shortage of skilled tradesmen working on the Kin complex.
Beesley says “there has and there hasn’t” been a disruption in the use of the Kin facilities. “This has been our biggest challenge by far in that we made a commitment to our user groups to make this as easy a transition as possible. And there’s no question that being down a rink has affected people. There has been some disruption and what I would call inconvenience to our user groups in the sense that we are doing a full-blown construction project around them and I know that some of the hockey tournaments over the winter have had some pretty challenging times in Kin 2 in particular, where there is a lot of noise some times and the heat has not been on. We have new heating being installed and there’s been some very, very cold weekends and general discomfort. Having said that, the thing that we’re really happy about is that through the co-operation and flexibility of our user groups, almost nobody has seen any significant reduction in ice times at all. But I do want to emphasize that I throw a lot of credit to the user groups that have been very co-operative with us and willing to make it work.”
Beesley says a precise completion date isn’t set yet, but the city fully plans to re-open the entire Kin complex in the fall.
Comments
If you call having no heat in Kin II “little disruption” I guess it’s true. :)
I’m not sure who designed the Kin 2 dressing room area but those metal beams sitting in the middle of the floor space are very strange.
Give a little…get a lot:)
The concept is moving ahead people, so lets make the best of it, the sites will never make everyones expectations but thatd life. Now that were in to it, lets try and support the whole event and help ensure taxpayers of PG are not undermined in the end meaning stuck with a big bill.
This will be an incredible asset to the community when it is complete!! Awesome!
If we built things right from the start…
The Kin Centres were inadequate from their first day of operation.
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