The Village of St. Pierre presented plans for a new recreation facility Wednesday night.  

Mayor Raymond Maynard made a big announcement at a town hall event. 

“We've got a project that we have been working on for two years. We are redoing our recreational centre. We are turning our current arena into a turfed fieldhouse, a quarter soccer pitch and we are going to be [building] an arena just northeast of where it currently is for phase one." 

Phase two of the project is a full-sized gymnasium connected to the proposed arena for indoor court activities.  

Maynard says the total cost of the project comes out to around $25M. He notes that is a big number, but they have a well-thought-out plan to make this project a reality. 

“We have applied for federal grants, provincial grants, and grants from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. If we receive all of those grants, we will have to fundraise $2.2M to be able to reach our target to complete the project." 

Having worked on this plan for such a long time, Maynard says it was incredibly exciting to finally present it to the residents of St. Pierre. 

“The response was quite good. I would say about 95 percent of the people were really excited about the project. Of course, the major concern was 'What is it going to cost the ratepayers?' We put that concern to bed when we indicated that the plan and the goal is to not have any increases in taxes for this project.” 

Maynard says they are hopeful that the provincial and federal governments will see the value that this project would bring to the Southeast. 

“It's good for the region. The part of it that is really good for the region is the soccer pitch. There are no indoor soccer pitches in southeastern Manitoba, the closest one is in Winnipeg and so we figured that by doing something no one has around the area, it will help to bring people in the region to our community and enhance what the other communities have.” 

The Village of St. Pierre already has the land needed to build the new arena and gymnasium. Maynard says they are working with the Red River Valley School Division. 

“Part of it is going to be built on their land and so it is a collaboration that we are doing. They are one of our partners, it is a great partnership, and we are hoping that this will help them also. There's always an increase in students and so we are hoping that this is going to help everything.” 

Maynard adds these new recreation facilities would also be used by the students of École Communautaire Réal-Bérard, which is part of the DSFM division and also in St. Pierre.