Photo

Vancouver’s lone ice rink is here to stay, after all.

After announcing an impending closure in early April, Mountain View Ice Arena owners announced Friday that it will remain open. City Bible Church elders approved the building’s sale Thursday evening, officially shuttering the church’s plan to build a school in its place.

Rink owner and church member Bruce Wood said he and rink manager Bob Knoerl delivered a letter of intent to purchase the rink to the church Tuesday. The sale was approved at approximately $4.1 million and included the reimbursement of costs incurred by City Christian Schools to convert the rink to a school.

“We’ve begun a journey to purchase the Mountain View Ice Arena and make it our permanent home,” Knoerl said in a letter addressed to rink users.

That marks a change of direction from an April 4 post on Mountain View Ice Arena’s Facebook page notifying patrons the rink would close Aug. 31. City Bible Church planned to convert the ice rink into a 20,000-square-foot school for students in kindergarten to fifth grade, according to a 2016 preliminary application with the city of Vancouver.

Wood had been working on locating a new location for the rink for more than a year and met with officials at the Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds in recent months as a potential site.