Woodbury Needs More Ice Sheets 2+2=4 Sheets (Figure & Hockey)
Woodbury needs more ice sheets.
We are adding 20,000 people to the City and our ice time is already full.
When my daughter was playing hockey in Woodbury, we got up way too early and stayed up way too late.
Different assumptions can be made to get different results but projecting $650,000 (Conservative direct) to $1,800,000 (Total Sports Tourism) of positive economic impact annually of having 2 sheets free for hosting 7 tournaments annually (Two of the Tourneys use both sheets).
An example, looking at page 146 of the 2019 budget document for 2017 actual dollars:
- Ice sheet rental earned by the City in 2017, actual Object 4461 (Revenue) excluding other ice programming under Objects 4460 & 4462, totaled $703,862 of the $1,653,211 total revenue for two sheets of ice (as the programming revenue is excluded). So we are assuming we just rent the ice sheets for practice.
- The construction cost for a *seasonal* sheet for *practice* is ~$600K for ice and ~$400K for a MN_DoT style weather shelter for the ice so that makes a capital cost ~$6K/mo or $72K/yr. Energy costs average $5K/mo for 8 months plus capital costs ~$120K/year if we use existing land.
- Two sheets would be ~$240K/yr. If we offset that with the actual ice rental of +$700K, we are revenue positive $460K/year.
Those are gross budget numbers. We could build longer season ice, with a larger cooling plan and more structure insulation. We could build stands and concessions and prepare for tournaments revenue and increases in Woodbury hotel stays.
Those all change the economics but we are talking about is adding economical practice ice to 1) give children more reasonable ice times and 2) reduce commuting during the school year.
Kim Wilson (also a Council candidate) has done a lot following on the City budget. I've talked about this issue with her. The City already spends annually to construct and maintain outdoor hockey ice. Kim was discussing how the City also overspent their $16M budget this year by +$15M; it was just a matter of hockey priorities that $2M of that wasn't spent on hockey ice, as it was millions spent on parks.
