At Athabasca’s centennial dinner in late July, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach announced that Athabasca had received a grant to help complete the Multiplex sports park project.
“The province will be providing $600,000 towards the Multiplex sports park in recognition of what our community did for Slave Lake,” CAO Doug Topinka stated.
The grant will allow the Multiplex to build three more baseball diamonds on top of the two existing slo-pitch diamonds. The three diamonds would be for bantam, peewee and mosquito levels. The plan also budgets for two regulation–sized soccer fields with irrigation, and one medium-sized practice field. Along with the soccer fields and ball diamonds, general park amenities such as shale and dugouts have been proposed. This will include a granular trail system connecting the sports fields with the Multiplex, Athabasca University and town trails. The trail system would also connect the future 38-stall parking lot, and tree planning has been proposed to provide separation between the fields and diamonds. The total cost of the project would total $1.2 million. When a grant was considered for a sports park in 2009, the Town of Athabasca denied the application. Now, two years later, the application no longer includes an outdoor rink, due to inflation of costs.
“That now has to go to the Multiplex Society and they’ll take a look at it, and see what we’re going to go ahead and act on at this time,” said Mayor Roger Morrill. “Nothing is for sure on this as far as exactly what we’re doing. We know what the money is earmarked for, but now we have to sit down and look at the total budget for everything we had asked for and see if we can go ahead and do it with the funds that were received.”
Athabasca County Reeve David Yurdiga said this was an important project to undertake and will benefit not only town residents, but county ones as well.
“We do have a large soccer following in the county, and the town. Currently we have no facilities for them as far as soccer pitches go,” Yurdiga said. “It’s a good thing for the community. Eventually we were going to have to do it, and with this grant from the province, we’re able to move forward.”
Rob Balay, manager of the Multiplex, said that the Soccer Association has pledged $250,000.
“It’s yet to be determined whether or not the county and town will fund more, or scale the project down because that’s all the grant money there was available,” he said. “We received less grant money than expected.
“We have $1.2 million committed, and when we go to tender and see how much it costs, that will determine how much of a project (there is). Maybe the market dictates that maybe we can do more, but maybe it comes in at $1.5 and we have to scale a few things back.”
