My recent articles posted on RinkAtlas have highlighted a few things about arena construction and maintenance at the community rink level. To recap this week:
- East Brunswick, New Jersey is building a new two-sheet arena with a price tag of $29.5 million.
- Kettering, Ohio needs to renovate a 50-year old community rink. Price tag $10 to 15 million.
New Arena Construction Costs
The hockey community in Central New Jersey welcomes two sheets of ice being constructed. East Brunswick Arena relieves some of the pressure on other facilities. There’s obviously not enough ice in Central New Jersey during the traditional hockey season. That impacts the ability of new hockey players to start and veteran hockey players to work on individual skill development.
My question, what is the cost of the East Brunswick facility relative to what it would have been a few years ago? If the going rate for 200 x 85 foot ice sheets in nicely designed facilities in the Northeast is $15 million, how many new facilities can we expect to be built to help grow the games of hockey, figure skating, and short-track speed skating?
For what it’s worth, HTG Architects published How to Build an Ice Rink for Less Than $12 Million, citing Ice in Paradise as a reference design for their “Rink in a Box” concept.
We respect HTG as part of the arena construction industry, but we have to follow up with them to understand if $8 to 12 million was a good estimate for single indoor ice surfaces, but recent inflation has driven costs up, as indicated by East Brunswick’s contracts? Or are low cost ice sheets still constructible in that price range?
The Maintenance Cliff
A maintenance cliff is a substantial cost to renovate an older arena, to bring it up to modern standards in one, large project. On RinkAtlas we will argue that deferred arena maintenance at the community, small, or medium-sized arena level eventually leads to a maintenance cliff.
In Kettering, Ohio, outside of Dayton, they have a community arena called Kettering Ice Arena that my friend Les Schriber was telling me is really nice. As I said earlier, the cost of renovating is estimated at $10 to 15 million, and the City is actually considering taking the ice plant completely out to reduce cost.
Kettering is just the tip of the iceberg. McCarthy Ice Arena in Batavia, in Western New York, needs a major renovation: $4 million dollars to replace the chiller and evaporator in 2024. But the total cost estimate was $2.5 million only 12 to 18 months ago.
The truth is, nobody wants to think about deferred maintenance.
But look arenas like Mennen Sports Arena or Codey Arena in North Jersey. These are 50+ year old facilities owned by the park commissions of Morris and Essex County respectively. Essex County built Rink 1 at Codey in 1958; Morris County built Rink 1 at Mennen in 1975.
Has anyone said anything about a maintenance cliff for either of these facilities?
Is Letting Arenas Reach a Maintenance Cliff Shrinking the Game?
Who is responsible for letting arena maintenance be deferred to the point where reaching a maintenance cliff is inevitable?
If the ice sports communities that use arenas like Kettering Ice Arena or McCarthy Ice Arena allow them to become an indoor community center, are they shrinking the game?
We’re all excited when something truly new gets built. Think of East Brunswick or NorthStar Ford Arena, the second building for Hermantown, Minnesota. But we have to think about what it costs to maintain the arenas we use everyday, and whether the owners of those facilities are doing the work that needs to be done to avoid a maintenance cliff.