A proposal to bring a Junior B Hockey team to Quesnel has been pushed back a year.
Spokesperson Cory Broadhead says the bid however, is alive and well.
“We were running out of time. We had an extension to January 1st to get our bid in to the KIJHL for them to vote on, but that’s only 9 months until puck drop for the season to start. We think it’s better to just wait until the following year, plus we fell short with a little bit of funding because of the franchise fee that we need to pay to join the league.”
Broadhead says a lot of the work however, has been done.
“Absolutely. Our business plan is ready to go, the budget is ready to go, we just need to come up with a 300 thousand dollar expansion fee. If we could just join the league and run the team right now, we would have our bid in already, but in order to make up that extra 300 thousand, we fell a little bit short.”
Broadhead says they have investors waiting to do it the following year.
Moving forward, he says they plan to hold a community meeting in the spring.
“Our plan is is to have a community meeting in March or April, and get a group together of whoever wants to be involved with the team. And what we’re looking for is for one is to start a list of volunteers that want to support the team once it gets here, or to help to fundraise to get into where we have the funds to support the team when it starts. And as well we need some investors, we’re hoping to get some local investors to put a little bit of money in as well.”
In the end, Broadhead says with the new timelines, they should be able to come up with an even stronger bid.
“The league would want us by December 1st of next year to have it in, but what we want to do is have it in by June-July so they can have their vote and we can have it approved by September, one year before the league would actually start. And that way we would have a whole year to get everything in place, like equipment orders and the works. You know there is a lot of work to do and that way it should be a lot stronger than if we were to go this year anyway.’
Broadhead says the goal is to have a team in the league for September of 2023.
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