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Melnyk badly needed something that would add strength to his wobbly balance sheet. Earlier efforts to locate a casino at the Canadian Tire Centre and to make the property a hub for major league soccer had crashed and burned.

“We had the conversation with Eugene to say, ‘This is a pretty significant project in terms of effort and pursuit costs. If we’re in, we’re all in,”’ Villazor recalled. “And he made the decision reasonably quickly at that point to say, ‘We’re all in. Let’s take this as far as we can.'”

That decision triggered 14 months of frantic work by a team that grew to include more than 200 people, who produced a 2,000-page submission.

The effort paid off when the NCC announced April 28 that an evaluation committee had ranked the proposal from Melnyk’s team, called RendezVous LeBreton, clearly ahead of a competing bid by the Devcore Canderel DLS Group.

As a result, RendezVous will have the opportunity to negotiate an agreement with the NCC to develop 21.6 hectares of the last large piece of undeveloped real estate in Ottawa’s core.

This newspaper spoke to key members of the RendezVous team to find out how its successful bid came together. It’s a tale of relationships and local connections, near super-human effort and critical choices.

It was obvious that Melnyk’s company would need a lot of help to tackle such an immense project. “We knew we would have to assemble a pretty broad team,” Villazor said.

The first member was Matt Rossetti, a Detroit architect who, with his father, had designed the Senators’ current arena more than two decades ago.