The city’s Governance and Priorities committee will hear from Saskatoon Blades ownership today (Monday) regarding playing a bigger part in Sasktel Centre operations and management.

In a letter written to city manager Jeff Jorgenson, Mike Priestner, Owner of Priestner Sports Group and the Saskatoon Blades says he believes there could be effortless synergy, between the city and the ownership group, when it comes to day-to-day operations of the arena.

Priestner says the best way to do that would be to enter into a public partnership and has formulated an extensive plan for what the management , operations and the financial side of that would look like. Priestner says Blades ownership has exciting ideas on how to tackle some of the challenges the arena has faced during the pandemic.  Priestner is requesting the chance to share that plan with city council to find a way to assist the building through these troubling times.

The City of Saskatoon doesn’t have a leave of absence program for city councillors, but that could change in the near future.  The Governance and Priorities committee will review a report today (Monday) with several options for the development of a Leave-of-Absence policy. Previously, no such policy could be created due to provincial legislation but recent amendments to the the Cities Act, have allowed Saskatoon to be able to adopt its own policy.  Currently members of council are disqualified from their position if absent from regular council meetings during a period of three consecutive months.

The committee will decide whether to recommend a completely internal review or to forward the issue to Saskatoon’s Municipal Review Commission to look at options.  The report says several other cities in Canada allow for leaves of absence by councillors, some allowing maternity or paternity leaves only while other jurisdictions allow for broader reasons like medical leave.