There will be no referendum on whether the city should proceed with the construction of a new $200-million arena/events centre in the city’s downtown core.
Ward 11 Coun. Bill Leduc tabled a motion to have the city look at adding the referendum question to the 2026 municipal election, but it failed to get off the ground at Tuesday’s meeting.
The 12-member balance of city council was unanimous in voting down Leduc’s motion to reconsider their unanimous decision on April 16 to greenlight the project.
Soon after Mayor Paul Lefebvre called a brief recess following the vote, a small crowd of people in the gallery began heckling city council.
“That’s not democracy, that’s demo-crazy,” one woman yelled repeatedly, while others yelled undefined allegations of collusion.
In the lead-up to Tuesday’s meeting, Leduc and the Minnow Lake Community Action Network encouraged people to attend the meeting through posts to Facebook.
“We need to fill the auditorium at city hall with 1,000 residents,” Leduc said in a post published on April 20. Although the gallery was nearly full on Tuesday, only a portion of them were there for the arena referendum question. The Greater Sudbury Cubs hockey team was invited to receive the mayor’s congratulations for being crowned the 2024 Northern Ontario Junior Hockey League champions, while several others were there to support the Mayor’s Task Force on 30x30, which aims to protect 30 per cent of Greater Sudbury’s natural landscape by 2030.
While making his case for a referendum, Leduc noted the 2021 Pricewaterhouse Coopers report cited a property on The Kingsway as an ideal location for the events centre over downtown. He also said that city council requested a report on the Sudbury Community Arena on Sept. 13, 2022, which city staff’s failure to produce might open them up for future liability.
The Pricewaterhouse Coopers report helped pave the way for city council to approve a property on The Kingsway for an arena/events centre project called the Kingsway Entertainment District (KED), which city council ultimately cancelled in July 2022.
Since then, the city council elected in 2022 has repeatedly affirmed support for a downtown location, which has included the city’s purchase and demolition of several downtown properties to make way for the project, beginning last year, and their April 16 decision to OK the project.
As for the report on the Sudbury Community Arena city council requested on Sept. 13, 2022, and Leduc said was never produced, it was presented to city council on time, on July 11, 2023, and helped set the groundwork for the $200-million arena project now underway.
“Give residents a chance to voice their opinion, that’s all I’m asking, that’s all (the public is) asking,” Leduc said during Tuesday’s meeting of his referendum proposal.
“I understand revitalizing downtown, but that comes from private investment, that doesn’t come from us. It’s the private sector that has to put the money in, not the municipality.”
Although the downtown events centre received unanimous city council support on April 16, including that of Leduc, he later clarified that he only voted in favour of it so he could table his referendum motion (only members who vote in favour of a decision up for reconsideration are eligible to vote for said reconsideration).
The last time a member of city council introduced a motion requesting a referendum on a municipal arena project was in February 2022, when then-Ward 3 Coun. Gerry Montpellier sought a referendum on what was then an estimated $113-million expense for a new arena.
Like Leduc’s latest motion, Montpellier’s effort was classified as a reconsideration, meaning only those members of city council who voted in favour of the KED were eligible to move the motion, which none of the eight eligible members, including Leduc, opted to do.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
