WESTLOCK – Close to a month after one wall on the southwest corner of Jubilee Arena came down, the 59-year-old arena continues to stand with Town of Westlock officials now saying demolition crews will be back on site the first week of 2023 to finish the job.
While the arena was able to celebrate the 59th year of the first official hockey game played there Dec. 29, 1963, days for the facility remain short with town CAO Simone Wiley confirming via e-mail Dec. 27 that demolition is scheduled to resume the week of Jan. 3 — town officials had previously stated the work would be done by the end of December.
The job had initially been pegged for completion in the early fall as the municipality first identified the week of Sept. 12, then the weeks of Sept. 19 and Oct. 31, for the final phase of the $280,000 demolition as the interior had been previously stripped — the most-recent delay came in early November after crews found more asbestos that didn’t get picked up in the original report on the building. As for the additional cost to do the asbestos abatement, operations director Robin Benoit told town councillors in mid-November it could be as high as $50,000.
On site Dec. 8 after one section of the southwest wall had crashed to the ground, Benoit said once the rubble is cleared the ground will need to sit for a while before it can be levelled and paved.
“The ground will actually rebound a bit after we remove the building. And then by later in the year we’ll have it as a paved parking lot,” he said.
A long road to demolition
Levelling the town’s first indoor arena was initially budgeted at $1 million and funded via unrestricted reserves in the municipality’s 2022 capital budget —Wiley has stated previously there will be additional costs to level and landscape the site in 2023.
Wiley said in the fall that while they’re disappointed the demo has been continually delayed, along with the revelation of more asbestos on site, they’re content that the final bill will be “substantially lower” than what was originally estimated. Benoit has also said previously that concrete from the arena will be recycled at the local Lafarge Canada site for free and the contractor has given them a credit back on the metal that will be scavenged.
Jubilee Arena, which was initially called the Westlock and District Jubilee Family Recreation Centre, opened July 13, 1963, and cost $75,744 to build. Meanwhile, the first hockey game at the facility was played Dec. 29, 1963, on natural ice as an ice plant wasn’t added until years later.
The arena was expected to come down following the opening of the Rotary Spirit Centre (RSC) in 2012, but those plans were shelved following the discovery of asbestos at the site — a report from that year stated that 16 of 26 building-material samples tested positive for the substance.
In late 2018, the council of the day talked about bulldozing the building and briefly considered renovating it for use as a warm-storage facility. But when faced with a $1 million price tag for that work, or $900,000 just to bulldoze it, council put the issue on the backburner.
