Red Lake Mayor Fred Mota still believes a regional events, arts and cultural hub would not only be beneficial for his municipality, but also good for the entire region.
Mota said municipal leaders are now exploring federal funding for the centre.
“Most recently we applied to something called the Green Inclusive Community Building Fund,” he said. “We've applied for the new arena multicultural facility and performing arts theatre.”
Mota said a requirement of the program is the project needs to be net carbon-zero.
“We've achieved that status for the new build,” he said. “But now it's in the hands of the federal government in regards to if we'll receive that funding or not.”
Mota said the challenge is that since it’s a federal program, Red Lake is competing against the rest of Canada — not just Ontario — for funding.
In January, Mota announced at a pre-budget consultation hearing that the municipality was unsuccessful in applying for one-time funding from the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program.
“Unfortunately, we were told that the program was oversubscribed and our project was not nominated from the province, moving forward to the federal government,” he said at the consultation session.
Mota said the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation Minister Greg Rickford has helped a little bit financially for preliminary work.
The NOHFC awarded $370,000 in November to help fund the project’s technical drawings.
Mota said the project is shovel-ready.
“We have the land completed, zoned appropriately. We have a class A engineer design fully completed,” he said. “All we're missing is the funding aspect. And if we get the funding today, tenders are going out tomorrow, we're that ready.”
Mota said he met Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair in Ottawa. He said part of the discussion included consideration for the facility to be involved in hosting evacuees from remote First Nations communities.
“As Red Lake has experienced, Pikangikum has experienced forest fires, flooding and all of those different things,” he said. “We can keep those families closer to home instead of being dispersed amongst the province or another province.”
Mota said even if the municipality got the federal funding, they would still need additional money to complete the project.
“We've had discussions with large industry partners. We have a REACH fundraising committee and we also have a municipal contribution that we'll also be making,” he said. “We're hopeful our application is going to be approved, but we're leaving it up to the federal Gods at this point.”
