(Britton Gray/980 CJME)

By Britton Gray

Mosaic Stadium, Evraz Place could handle hub city role: REAL CEO

May 29, 2020 | 6:32 PM

If the CFL decides to take a hub cities approach to the 2020 season, the operators of Evraz Place believe they could handle the load.

Tim Reid, CEO of Regina Exhibition Association Limited (REAL), said there has been work done to find out what being a hub city might entail. But there are still questions surrounding it.

“I’m not sure that anybody knows (what it would look like). To the credit of the CFL and the Saskatchewan Roughriders, I think they’re trying to gather as much information as they can. I think our sense of it is there’s some sense of massing of teams and organizations in a location and those teams will practise and play at one site,” Reid said.

“We feel we’ve got a fantastic stadium, we’ve got 100 acres of well-developed campus and facility space. Whatever the needs of the CFL would be, if publicly safe to do so, I feel we could respond well.”

Reid said one of the advantages REAL’s facilities have is the amount of free space the teams would have available.

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“Should we need to quarantine or self-isolate individuals, should we need to have additional medical testing, what spaces could we use?” Reid said. “I think the nice thing with it is is that Mosaic Stadium is such a modern facility with so many great amenities.

“In the absence of corporate hosting or corporate suites or fans, it creates a lot of real estate in the building that we can use for alternate purposes like personal safety.”

As of now, Reid says REAL is preparing as it would for any other season at Mosaic Stadium.

“We’re doing our regular spring maintenance at Mosaic Stadium, we’re starting to prepare the facility,” he said. “It’s taking longer because we don’t have as many people and we don’t have the urgency because there’s no kickoff date in June.”

Reid said REAL is currently working with its tenants to begin bringing them back on site. He said it’s still premature to discuss when players may be able to use the Roughriders’ facilities, but work is being done to bring team staff back to Mosaic Stadium.

“We’ve taken the opportunity to really deep-clean all of our buildings and do a lot of the maintenance that’s hard to do when you have 3.7 million visitors a year,” Reid said.

Reid said work has been done to improve a variety of things, including on-site washrooms and replacing lights inside the Co-operators Centre.

REAL has also embarked on a deep-cleaning of its facilities during this time as it waits for when it can start bringing events back to the Queen City.

“We’re in the business of bringing people together and hosting major events and we’d like to get back there as soon as we can,” Reid said. “We also realize and recognize and appreciate the fact the province has the jurisdictional responsibility for public safety.

“When it’s the right time and the public can be entertained again in a safe way, we’d be more than happy to getting back to doing what we do best.”