A new plan for sinking arena

The City of Iqaluit has come up with a new approach to fix the Arctic Winter Games arena, which is sinking into the tundra.

At a council meeting on Tuesday, David St. Louis, the city’s director of recreation, presented a plan to remove the part of the floor that has sunk and replace it temporarily with sand. The sand would act as a base to make ice on, this winter.

Removing the floor will also give engineers a chance to see what’s under the floor. The concrete slab will be reinstalled when city engineers deem the floor to be stable.

City staff would be able to do most of the labour, but St. Louis advised council to approve a recommendation to pay FSC Architects & Engineers $15,000 to monitor the work, investigate why it’s sinking, and help city staff make sure that removing the floor does not damage the boards, which are already buckling as their foundation sinks into the ground.

“I commend the leadership of whoever is involved in this,” Coun. Stu Kennedy said.

The arena has remained closed this winter while engineers figure out a way to make ice on a floor that has sunk seven inches on one end.

Earlier this year, the City hired AMEC Earth and Environment Consultants to study the problem and find a solution. The consultants suggested building a drain around the building and doing yearly concrete injections into the floor, at a cost of up to $100,000 per year.

Council rejected the idea, and asked city staff to find a permanent solution.

IDEA official calls public meeting on “sinking ship” school system

An Iqaluit education representative wants other parents fed up with what he calls the “potholes” in the community’s school system to come out in force to a rare town hall meeting to voice their concerns.

Sean Maloney, a member of the Iqaluit district education authority, said the meeting on Nov. 29 comes at a crucial time, when the government of Nunavut is already gearing up for next year’s budget.

In the lead up to the budget, IDEA members plan to push the GN to do more about the immediate needs of the school system in Iqaluit, instead of focusing most of its resources on long-term goals.

“The ship is sinking,” Maloney said of the Iqaluit school system. “We’ve got some serious problems. The needs of Iqaluit are different than any other community in this territory.”

According to the IDEA, parents are increasingly concerned about overcrowded classrooms, lack of teaching assistants, the shortage of Inuktitut teaching material, and the number of school drop-outs.

He said comments at the meeting will be used to leverage more money out of the GN in their next budget, but also to guide the IDEA on where they should focus their time and energy.

The town hall meeting will start around 8 p.m. on Monday, in the library at Inuksuk High School.