Chatham-Kent's Kraft Hockeyville arena upgrades will be ready in time for the upcoming hockey season this fall.
The long-awaited projects at Memorial Arena in Chatham include new heaters in the building, a new marquee display sign, and new accessible entrance doors.
The costs are being covered by the $100,000 that Chatham-Kent won by placing second in the 2015 Kraft Hockeyville contest.
Manager of recreation facilities Scott Mailing says one reason the process took more than two years to complete is because municipal officials were waiting to see if a new arena would be built in Chatham.
"We were kind of holding a bit to see at the time [if a new arena would be built]," says Mailing. "When that didn't pan out, we said, 'OK, the arena's not going anywhere for a bit -- as far as we know -- so we went on with the process of tendering the projects out."
The tendering process also presented some challenges.
Mailing says when the municipality was trying to find a company to install the new accessible doors, there was a problem with the tendering process. Because of that, municipal officials had to re-tender the project, which held up the installation of the new sign because officials were waiting to see how much the doors would cost before they knew how much they could spend on the rest of their plans.
Mailing says they chose the heating, the sign, and the doors because they could be transferred to another arena -- if a new one is built in Chatham in the near future.
"These won't be wasted if by some chance something happened with a new arena," says Mailing. "They could be used either on the new arena or on one of our existing facilities."
Mailing says municipal officials are well aware that there are other parts of Memorial Arena that are due for upgrades -- like the bathrooms -- but he says that work would cost much more than $100,000 to complete.
He says the two main goals of the upgrades they settled on were to be "visible" and "re-usable."