Big Lake building ice arena

BIG LAKE — A new facility being built on Makati Road will provide ice time to practice-starved Valley hockey teams.

But what’s probably most impressive about the effort to build the Big Lake Recreation and Community Center is that, so far at least, the project hasn’t taken in any government money.

“It’s a community that cared about its kids and its well being,” said Bill Haller of the Big Lake Lion’s Club, the organization putting the project together.

And it’s not as if the community didn’t have to dig deep to get the project off the ground.

“We’ve got $650,000 in hand we still need to raise about $200,000 more,” Haller said.

Just under half of that money — $300,000 to be exact — came from the Mat-Su Health Foundation. The rest came from private donors. And there have been a lot of in-kind donations as well.

“We’ve had people donate lots of time and effort and money and resources,” Haller said.

Those in-kind contributions include the land the facility will be built on, volunteers who did the site preparation and excavation work, and reduced rates on the metal building and concrete.

He said the building will not be heated and thus ambient temperature will freeze the ice and keep it solid. The plan is to, in the summertime, roll out some artificial turf and maybe even set up a roller-hockey rink.

Right now, he said, crews are pouring the building’s foundation. Construction should proceed through the summer.

“We hope to have the building erected sometime in the middle of June,” he said.

The money the project still needs, he said, is about what it would take to install heaters in the garage for the Zamboni and do interior wiring and fire sprinkler systems.

Though this is just phase one of the project — phase two includes heated meeting rooms and a heated mezzanine for watching games on the rink — Haller said that at 26,000 square feet, it’s going to be the biggest building in Big Lake.

And, he said, it’s a sorely needed facility in the area. Local hockey players have to drive into Wasilla or Palmer to practice. The old practice facilities — hockey rinks next to the various Valley schools — were taken down long ago.

When those old outdoor rinks went away, he said, some of the hockey programs in the northern reaches of the Valley withered. The school district only budgets an hour’s worth of ice time per team per week.

“The whole goal or plan was to provide ice time for $50 an hour instead of the $200 an hour it costs at the Brett (Memorial Ice Arena in Wasilla),” Haller said.

Even assuming a hockey program can meet those costs, the programs have to jockey for space at the various ice rinks around town.

“They’re just overwhelmed with people wanting to use the facilities,” he said.

Having a place to go in Big Lake, he said, will likely relieve some of that pressure.

“I think we’ve come a pretty long way,” he said of the project.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.