Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, Jubilee Plaza

The Jubilee Plaza is in the final construction stages, and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo can not wait until spring to launch the project. The first visitors may not see all of the features right away as some will be added even after the launch. Arndis Bildfell, a community services staffer with the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, said “It’s a natural gathering place in the heart of downtown, so I’ve been meeting with a lot of our community organizations … to see the space for what it can be and what it is, and to bring their programming down to the space. We will program such events like a lunchtime activity or something to get the local office people out of their office down in the plaza for 20 minutes or whatever … to give them a little fresh air and sunshine, which we all need.”

The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo had hoped to open the Jubilee Plaza in October, but the delay was not that long and the project is on track to come in at the budget amount of $16.9 million that was set. According to Arndis Bildfell “We had anticipated October. Obviously, when you get into construction projects and stuff, you always encounter certain things such as construction schedules, dealing with sub-consultants and those kind of things. And the reality is we’ve come pretty close to target.” Bildfell continued by saying “With the winter opening, as Marc had mentioned, two of the major elements won’t be in place until the spring. So it leaves us a unique opportunity to test out the space over the winter, to offer it to community groups and organizations into the space to test it out for their own programming.”