MOBERLY — The city of Moberly will soon welcome mid-Missouri’s second ice rink to its community.
Tom Sanders, Moberly’s public works director, said the city originally looked into acquiring a real ice rink, but the cost turned out to be more than the city could commit to.
“New or $200,000 plus, they [ice rinks] have a lot of materials to go along with them,” he said. “You know, the ice cleaner, the skates, the racks, all that stuff. And it just was kind of put aside because of the cost.”
That changed, however, when an opportunity opened up.
“This one, that was just a couple of years old, had everything with it, skates,” Sanders said. “The whole works for the price that we acquired it for, you know, we couldn’t pass it up.”
Moberly approached the city of Gladstone with the idea of purchasing the rink after hearing that Gladstone wasn’t utilizing the rink efficiently enough for business.
Moberly purchased the synthetic ice rink for around $20,000, according to Sanders. But the price isn’t the only advantage of the unique rink.
The leading manufacturer of synthetic ice, known as “glice,” makes skating rinks far easier to operate and much less expensive compared to a conventional skating rink, according to Mark Winter, CEO of Glice North America.
Regular ice rinks require resurfacing every hour and a half, in which a Zamboni cuts the sufrace and lays down a layer of water that freezes. Winters says this is usually done four or five times a day, costing around $45,000 to $60,000 a month in water, power, refrigerants and maintenance.
Meanwhile a synthetic ice rink requires no resurfacing, nor all the water, power, chillers or compressors like a normal ice rink. Winter said it only needs periodic cleaning once a day.
Glice synthetic ice is made through a process called sintering, which crushes plastic pellets under both high pressure and heat, giving it the same smooth glide as a regular ice rink.
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Therefore, the synthetic ice rink can operate in any ambient temperature, and typically costs less than 10% of the cost of regular ice to maintain and operate, according to Winter.
That’s why Sanders was so fond of purchasing the rink from Gladstone.
“We just felt like that would be a good opportunity to have, you know, for people to do something in Moberly in the off season,” Sanders said.
Businesses in the area are excited for the new attraction.
Summer Branstetter, co-owner of A Stroke of Magic, a retail store featuring items from local vendors, said she found out the news about a month ago and is happy to welcome something different.
“Moberly has been working on getting some new attractions going on here, and we’re really excited to have something so unique to the community and just right down the street from us,” Branstetter said.
Branstetter said the rink’s uniqueness will bring new visitors to the city, which could help business.
“The closest [rink] to us is about an hour away in Jeff City,” she said. “So I think it would be nice and hopefully pull people from the area, different areas, to bring in different people to see what Moberly has to offer.”
Moberly will place the new rink at the Fennel Event Center, an outdoor venue that hosts events for the community, on Clark Street.
The city of Moberly hopes to have the rink operating to the public by winter, but Sanders said it will still need some construction work done once it arrives.