Due to the financial struggles being experienced by TCU Place, Saskatoon’s Governance and Priorities Committee has voted in favour of exploring a merger between SaskTel Centre and TCU Place. 

Councilor Bev Dubois made the motion at Wednesday’s meeting.

“Just given the financial struggles of especially TCU Place and somewhat SaskTel Centre, and the potential DEED moving forward, not in the very near future but moving forward, I think it’s time to revisit this again. We have done this previously, many, many years ago.”

The committee also approved a budget increase of $500,000 over the next three years to the convention centre following a request from TCU Place CEO Tammy Sweeney. 

“Revenues are strong and right now, they are higher than pre-Covid, but costs have outpaced recovery. We’ve run about a $500,000 deficit for four years, even with cost cutting, and our funding has remained unchanged at $500,000 a year for more than 30 years,” she explained.

She says despite cuts to training, discretionary spending, programming costs and price upticks, their current budget is no longer sustainable due to advertising, promotions, and security expenditures. She adds that most Canadian convention centres receive 15-20 per cent of their revenue from government funding, whereas TCU Place only receives 4 per cent.  

“We’re not seeing the degree of national business that we once had. Pre-Covid, we had seven to ten national conferences a year, which were about $1 million to our budget in revenue. We’re now seeing four, maybe five, and they’re significantly smaller.”

TCU Place has also lost about $600,000 in business annually to other cities. Sweeney attributes this to the fact that the space isn’t big enough. 

The approvals will still have to be brought before City Council to get a final go-ahead.