Lease negotiations between the city and Bluewater Gymnastics Club [BGC] have been put on hold to bring the Sarnia Girls Soccer Club into the conversation.
Former Sarnia Police Chief Phil Nelson, a member of the Girls Soccer Board of Directors, told city council he was "startled" by a lengthy report on rent and future building proposal options included in Monday's agenda, because the soccer club had "never been consulted at any time."
The soccer club's legal counsel, Frank Fazio, said the club has been without a lease at Lottie Neely Park for over a year.
"We agreed to a standstill agreement," said Fazio. "That we would continue to pay the current rent until we could agree on a price that we would use in the future. So, what's happened since, is we've really not gotten anywhere in terms of getting our lease renewed. That's kind of disturbing, and now we're entering into a phase where they're [Bluewater Gymnastics Club] talking about expanding the building, and possibly retrofitting parts of the building, that may or may not affect us in terms of a lease arrangement."
Fazio said they just want to get the lease renewed.
"The only thing that we asked was that if it's not something that we want to do mutually then just let us know. We'll go through what the contract says that we can do, which is take it to arbitration. It's not our preferred way to do it. We obviously want to agree on a number," he said.
Fazio said their presence will help determine if BGC can actually build on the property, or buy the lands, as has been proposed.
"There are contracts for the fields, there's contracts for the building, we've kind of got to be in the same room with some of that stuff," Fazio added.
He said the soccer club doesn't need any more, or less, space.
"But we certainly don't need to be paying for a retrofit of HVAC, and all that sort of thing, that doesn't affect us anyway," he said.
Sarnia council directed staff to extend the current term of the existing lease with BGC by three months and report back on lease term negotiations with BGC at the July 10 meeting.