Recapping added Centennial Park coverage

(Editor’s note: The Restaino Centennial Park press conference brought numerous media outlets. We will work through sharing them all. Here is WIVB.)

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. (WIVB) — Niagara Falls city administrators are turning their focus as to how an approximately $200 million planned events center adjacent to the Seneca Niagara Casino will be paid for.

The city is working to acquire the land that stretches from John Daly Boulevard to 10th Street via Falls Street from Niagara Falls Redevelopment via eminent domain for the project. If it comes to fruition, the project will include a 6,000-seat arena that could serve host to a major junior hockey team in the Ontario Hockey League, an indoor space for youth and amateur sports, an indoor-outdoor skating rink and a parking garage.

According to a feasibility study conducted by The Sports Facilities Advisory and detailed by mayor Rob Restaino and other city administrators on Thursday, the cost is projected to be somewhere from $178 million to $217 million.

However, the city still needs to acquire the necessary money to build it. Restaino said that he has advocated to acquire state funding to at least partially cover the cost of the project. He called it “premature” to come up with exact percentages as to how much would be covered from which entities.

“We haven’t had those conversations yet because we’re still going through this next phase, which is the feasibility study, determining what the cost of this will be,” Restaino said Thursday. “Now we have to answer those questions. We have to look for that information.”

State Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes attended and spoke at Thursday’s event.

The feasibility study concluded that the new arena would generate around $10 million per year, much of that coming from local hotel stays and conferences. Youth sports tournaments are a major driver in the fight to build the events center.

Niagara Falls Redevelopment said in a statement later Thursday that the feasibility study “covers the same ground as earlier studies, and clearly shows that profit from the facility wouldn’t even come close to covering the debt service for financing acquisition costs for the privately owned land.” The group’s full statement can be seen below.

The study used four comparable facilities to come up with the numbers: Mullett Arena in Tempe, Ariz.; Erie Insurance Arena in Erie, Pa., which also hosts an Ontario Hockey League team; LECOM Event Center in Elmira; and Blue Cross Arena in Rochester.

Some residents who attended Thursday’s event criticized the project based on cost and the lack of community input. Restaino pushed back on the idea that there wasn’t community input, citing a community engagement study done about the project.

“How does this project really aid to the fulfillment of the city as a whole? I heard the hotels, I hear that,” one resident asked of Restaino. “I don’t care what you bring into this city and you build, there’s nothing to go to the community. How is this going to be effective for them?”

The project is expected to bring year-round jobs to staff the arena in a city where much of the tourism workforce is female and of color. Each year, one-third to one-half of around 10,000 seasonal tourism workers get laid off each fall, which works out to around 4,000 people. About 75% of those laid off are women and about 78% are people of color.

The arena would host 34 home games each year between September and March plus playoff games, and would host year-round concerts and other events.

“We have some people in our city who will always find fault in a new police station, train station, now our new convention center that we’re going to have,” City Council Chair Jim Perry said. “These people are also the same people that complain about the plight of our city.”

If the city is able to obtain the funds to build the arena, it still does not know when construction would begin and when the first hockey game would be. The OHL has whittled it down to two potential ownership groups once the arena is built.

“Site control is critical. Now that site control is accomplished … we have all the specialties for steps that come next. I would love to be able to tell you that I have a date and a timeline and everything else, I think that’s often been the problem,” Restaino said. “You’ve heard plans come out and people talking about deadlines and all this other stuff, and then what happens? As the Majority Leader said, we study and study and study and then the study collects dust.”

Western New York is in need of a mid-size indoor arena built for hockey and other events. KeyBank Center, the Sabres’ home arena, has a capacity of 19,200, but the second-largest ice arena, Harborcenter, only has a capacity of 1,800.

“We’ve been talking about transformative projects for decades and nothing has transpired,” Restaino said. “There’s been a lot of ideas. Some of them good, some of them not so good. I think, and this study verifies, that we have something really good to pursue.”