St. Cloud Approves Upgrades for Municipal Athletic Complex

(KNSI) – St. Cloud gave the go-ahead to improve a community ice arena.

The city council unanimously approved authorizing the design and study of an estimated $14 million in upgrades to the Municipal Athletic Complex. St. Cloud will use $10 million allocated by the state for upgrades during the 2022 Legislative session. The rest will likely come from the local sales tax.

St. Cloud community services and facilities director Scott Zlotnik feels the MAC is an amazing asset for the community and told KNSI News the improvements have been a long time coming. “We’ve been talking about this and hoping to get this done for about 13 years now. We did have a referendum in front of the voters here last year [2022], which obviously got turned down. So we kind of had to regroup and we’re perpetuating something significantly smaller.”

Voters rejected a half-cent sales tax to raise $21.1 million to match the $10 from the state to expand and redo the facility.

Zlotnik believes the 14,000-square-foot two-story expansion will let them modernize the MAC. “It’s about the refrigeration, we have the old R22. That’s been outlawed. We’re going to convert that to ammonia. That’s a big change, we’re going to do some geothermal expansion. We got some lockers being planned. And on the second floor, it’ll be sort of what we refer to as a dryland training area.”

St. Cloud will collaborate with architects and hopes to start work in 2025. The goal is to complete construction in 2026.

___