Plans for the new Chief Jim Koe Park are vastly under budget for what the town of Inuvik wants to accomplish with the redesign, prompting the architectural firm to ask council for permission to enter talks with Aurora College to enlist the services of students to help bring costs closer to what's available.
Taylor Architecture principal Simon Taylor explained the situation to council at the Nov. 13 meeting.
"With respect to this project, you've got about 580-square-metres of built space and you have $400,000 to develop the site," said Taylor. "For comparison, when you're building a house up here you're spending about $4,000 to 5,000 per square metre. So you when start to apply that to this project, you're looking at between $1 million to $2 million to do what you want to do."
To complement the Midnight Sun Complex, successive town councils have been eyeing a refurbished central park for more than decade, but with Inuvik hosting the 50th anniversary of the Northern Games next summer, the clock is ticking on having venues to support the event.
Chief administrative officer Grant Hood explained the town was combining a number of grant opportunities and matching grants to bring in the funding. The initial $400,000 budgeted to get the work underway is coming from the town's capital budget, which is being met with a number of other grants the town is receiving and a few still being applied for.
These costs will go toward establishing a permanent structure for the Arctic Market and other events as well as remaking the information booth into a full-time visitor centre to handle tourism and merchandising.
"Right now, when a visitor comes, our staff are not only doing dog tags, water licences they're trying to do the actual business of running the town," noted director of economic development Jackie Challis. "There's also a group of 20 tourists coming in, trying to size a sweatshirt and figure out what key chain they should buy. To try and transition some of that into a facility that's actually meant for that is part of the intention."
A separate funding stream to cover the costs of the stage replacement is awaiting a decision from Heritage Canada. A third wing of the development, establishing a public washroom and concession area, is likely to be held off until the first two phases are figured out.
Regardless, Taylor told council to contract out the work for those first two phases would be likely far more than council can secure from grants and council would have to reduce the scope of the project with the current budget. He suggested involving the college into the project and help students learning trades get some hands-on knowledge and the college had already indicated it was open to the idea.
"We still think $400,000 is a workable budget but would like to propose a different approach," said Taylor. "We would like to propose a Project Manager be brought on and we explore the possibility of working with the college and trades program to look at building some elements of this. If we do that, we feel we can build something that is both compelling and interesting but also within the budget.
"I think you'll end up with a very exciting structure. Something your community built and something that's really usable."
Council voted unanimously to explore the idea and Taylor said he would reach out to representatives of the college and return with a more detailed proposal once they talk.