Three weeks ago city staff recommended Peterborough city council hire consultants at a cost of $126,000 to study proposed sites that will now include the Market Plaza for a new sports and entertainment centre.

Just last September the previous council received another report, this one costing $157,000, telling them the Memorial Centre was "functionally obsolete" and needed replacing and the preferred site for the replacement was Morrow Park.

That first report told council and taxpayers nothing more than a high school civics' class project could have ascertained in a few days of study. Now our new council is going back for another report that will tell us not much more.

The only two logical sites for a new entertainment centre including a 5,500 seat arena, a secondary pad and the Sports Hall of Fame are the Market Plaza and Morrow Park. A drive past both sites shows Morrow Park is shovel-ready now and the Market Plaza will need millions of dollars to purchase existing buildings and prepare the site for a major complex.

Not lost in this latest interest for a new facility is what the city went through in building the Memorial Centre.

The PMC was seriously proposed in 1938 and finally finished in 1956. In the years before construction began and when the budgeted costs tripled from around $275,000 to $850,000, the councils of the day discussed and later rejected nearly a dozen different sites for the PMC.

One of those sites was what is now called the Market Plaza.

An extensive article written by Harry Theobald in the Peterborough Examiner on Dec. 13, 1956, published just days before the official opening of the Memorial Centre, documented the long road to its construction.

In reference to the Market Plaza site, Theobald wrote: "(In 1946) the land owned by the city on George Street between Townsend and Rink streets, was suggested but extra footing(s) through the reclaimed frog pond of years ago were estimated to cost $40,000."

When the city went for bids for the arena in the Market Plaza they came in at a shocking $708,000. That included necessary footings and a floating concrete floor for $85,000. Based on those numbers from 1946, 12 per cent of the cost of the new arena was to prepare the site that was originally a frog pond.

In March of 1947 council abandoned plans for the Market Plaza site and began concentrating on the Morrow Park site.

Now that the city has again put the Market Plaza site back into consideration for the new entertainment facility, it begs the question: If it was estimated that 12 per cent of the cost of an arena on the site in 1946 would be needed to prepare the site, what will it cost today? Also included in the new site costs will be the price to purchase the buildings on the site (there was only an ice house there in 1946), to demolish them and prepare the grounds. Does it take an out-of-town consulting firm to determine those costs?

An entertainment centre on that site will certainly revitalize the area and encourage more foot traffic in the downtown area on event nights, but will the extra costs of obtaining and preparing the site compared to the Morrow Park site be worth it?

That is the question our city staff should figure out, not consultants.

It is obvious there are some public concerns as to the ability of city staff to give fair evaluations after the way they handled the Memorial Centre floor situation, but taxpayers and council should expect some value for those sunshine list salaries we are paying.

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