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City seeks convention-centre price tag

HEATHER MCLAUGHLIN
Published Wednesday May 30th, 2007
Appeared on page A5
Negotiations are ongoing with a consortium of companies headed by ADI Ltd. to establish the scope of work and cost of designing a downtown convention centre for Fredericton.

City council has authorized its finance staff to seek permission from the municipal capital borrowing board to fund $1 million through its bankers to start the detailed work.

ADI won a call to do the spaces-needs analysis for the facility and the company has the option of negotiating to do the design work.

"We've finished the programming and master planning phase," said Team Fredericton executive director Don Fitzgerald.

Team Fredericton is the city's economic-development office.

"The next stage is the preliminary design," Fitzgerald said.

That means taking the concepts about meeting-room sizes, common areas, washroom and other amenities and fitting them into a design.

As well, the consultants will have to undertake technical analysis of the ground to determine its hydro geology and weight-bearing capacity to see if it will fit with the building's design concepts.

"We're negotiating with them for that scope of work," Fitzgerald said.

Cannon Design of Buffalo, N.Y., and Urban Strategies Inc. of Toronto are working with ADI on the convention-centre project.

Councillors want to develop the building as an add-on to The Playhouse, which is city-owned, and the city wants to construct another parking garage in the downtown east end.

The provincial government has expressed approval-in-principle to an office building component that would be a replacement for the aging Centennial Building, constructed in 1967.

The building's mechanical systems require significant upgrades.