An ice rink reserve fund will likely be tapped in the near future due to leaks from the ice chiller.
Water and wastewater Superintendent Michael Ficarella discussed the matter with City Council during its meeting Monday evening.
“We recently had to add emergency refrigerant,” he said to members at City Hall. “The refrigerant creates your ice. In order to get it and keep it up (to operating standards), we needed to add 360 pounds of refrigerant.”
The cost for that emergency measure was $21,950, he said in a memo to City Manager Rachael Tabelski. She suggested holding spending of $170,000 for revamped locker rooms in lieu of rectifying the faulty ice rink chiller.
“We continue to discover issues with the chiller,” Ficarella said.
If there’s no ice, renovated locker rooms wouldn’t be necessary, so the chiller should come first, he said.
Ficarella added that it’s not a matter of asking “can we use it?
“We absolutely need it,” he said.
Improved communication between the city and new management, which includes Carrier Commercial Services, has meant an increased amount of issues brought to light, he said. For example, a compressor replacement installed some time ago hadn't even been turned on and therefore hadn't been working.
"So when Michael and (Public Works Superintendent Brett Frank) talk about the increased communication and relationship between ourselves and Carrier, who we have a contract with, and the rink, we're going to keep running into these things," Tabelski said. "Because we're going to continue to find places that might not have been maintained to the level that they need it to be for operations to continue."
Frank estimated the unit was several decades old — considered to be original equipment with the arena’s construction in the 1970s.
Council member Tammy Schmidt said there was a time when locals weren’t very happy with the condition of the arena, and that is changing with new management led by businessman Matt Gray for the newly dubbed David M. McCarthy Memorial Ice Arena on Evans Street. Her grandson plays hockey there, and "it's not a rink we could have been proud of a couple of years back," she said.
“I know the locker rooms are absolutely in need of repair. They're super bad," Schmidt said. "And I hope we're not just going to spend all the (funding on) refrigerant and not do those locker rooms at all, because we want to be proud of that, right?"
Ficarella asked that the emergency refrigerant cost be taken out of the ice rink reserve, which currently has a balance of $357,000.
The matter, and a related vote, was moved to a future business meeting.
File photo of the McCarthy ice arena in Batavia.
