Yellowknife (Jan 07/05) - City Hall has received a lot of interesting ideas about what to do with the Gerry Murphy Arena site, but it could be years before anything is built to replace it.

On Tuesday, city council rejected a recommendation from City Hall staff to form a committee that would draft a comprehensive plan on what should be built there.

Instead, they opted to accept design principles put forward by administration that could see a larger city council chamber, a civic plaza and one or two other buildings constructed on that site. The civic buildings could house a library or any number of things suggested by the public.

Regardless of what they eventually decide to build there, the question on most councillors' minds was how much would it all cost?

Coun. Blake Lyons said the city's infrastructure gap - the dollar amount between what is needed and what the city can afford to build - may force council to consider less grandiose proposals because the price tag may prove too much to swallow.

City Hall doesn't have an exact calculation of how big the gap really is right now, but it's in the millions.

Last year, they estimated it at $14 million.

"My experience has been that you look at what you can afford and look at what you are going to need in the future," said Lyons.

"Right now, the water, the sewer, the roads - those are the basics."

Other ideas presented to the city for the Gerry Murphy site include an artist-run centre, an indoor skateboard park and a cultural centre. Some councillors are in favour of building a new library on the site - possibly joining City Hall by an enclosed walkway.

The city could always borrow money to build a new facility on the site, but that would likely require a public plebiscite - a tricky proposition at best. It would also shackle the city with more debt at a time when they're trying to pay it down.

Lyons pointed to public consultations several years ago when the city was contemplating a new arena, which eventually led to the construction of the Multiplex.

The original price tag quickly shot up from a projected $5 million to $11 million once the city tallied up all the extras proposed by the public.

"Then we went to a plebiscite and people said, 'nope, we don't want you to borrow the money,'" said Lyons.

"I didn't blame them because we were facing a serious crunch at the time."

Lyons said the city should be careful in ensuring all the numbers are figured out before they make any decisions on the Gerry Murphy site.

Nothing budgeted

Mayor Gord Van Tighem said there's nothing budgeted for the site over the next few years, anyway.

All the city plans to do this summer, besides tabling a design plan, is level off the site where the old arena once stood.

"We now have a process in place where the results of the public consultation, with the input from council, will be costed and then we'll go back for another round of public consultation," said Van Tighem.

"By then, maybe we'll have budgeted some money or have found a benefactor."

He said borrowing money is out of the question, but one possible source of cash might be federal Infrastructure Minister John Godfrey, visiting Yellowknife in two weeks.

For now, Van Tighem said the Gerry Murphy site will be "a sightline to the lake."