De Pere Youth Hockey partners with city to fund arena upgrades

DE PERE – The De Pere Youth Hockey Association is launching a new fundraising committee to raise money for updates, repairs and maintenance of the ice arena.

Volunteers plan to sell advertising banners and signs inside the ice arena.

They believe that once the committee gets up and running, it can earn $60,000 per year in advertising and sponsorship revenue for the arena.

Some of their ideas include selling advertising space within the rink, including rink dasher boards, wall boards above the player benches, locker room door wraps, lobby sponsorship and restroom door flyers.

Cassandra Brill and Brandon Bergner are heading up the effort. 

“What we’re interested in doing is making sure that we’re leveraging what’s available now at the ice rink to work to earn money to put back into the ice rink,” Brill said. 

She said in their forays throughout the state with the team, they see lots of other rinks doing innovative things with sponsorships.

“We see a lot of advertising opportunity,, and we really want to make sure that we’re using that to put money into the ice rink,” she said. “We’re looking at short-term improvements and long-term improvements … . We have safety things, like the rubber flooring — we have people tripping, we have skates gouging out — we want to make sure that when we have visitors come to our rink, they’re safe and they are not saying ‘Ugh, that De Pere rink.’ We want to make sure that we are safe and we’re presenting our community in a good light, so really we just want to get the ball rolling and having the rink start earning money for itself.”

She said the rink could potentially earn $60,000 a year for itself but it could take a few years to get the system up and running. 

“Of course you have to sell that, and that will take a few years to build up. We will have to get creative with how we do that,” Brill said. “Right now our goal is just to get the ball in motion and earn money for the rink that we can use to do those short term improvements while looking at the long-term picture.”

“I think the proposal is a necessity for the rink being able to continue and thrive over the next 10 to 20 years,” Marty Kosobucki, director of the De Pere Department of Parks, Recreation, and Forestry, said in a memo to the board of park commissioners.

De Pere Youth Ice Hockey also committed to donating $50,000 to the ice arena.

Don Chilson of the Brown County ice management team, said one of the arena’s four compressors has a short circuit and is no longer operational. 

“The short can be caused by years of vibration as they run,” Chilson said, adding that the replacement cost for a new compressor is more than $24,000. 

As of May 31, the De Pere Ice Arena had just over $35,000 in the bank and just under $90,000 in fixed assets.

Its total income of $253,204.25 came from figure skating, private ice rental, non-contracted ice rental, summer ice rental, vending, kick-synch, and ice rental to the De Pere Deacons.

Its total reported expenses of $235,574.67 included $20,598.93 in building expenses; $15,120 in insurance expenses; $8,179.93 in office expenses; and $112,648.99 in payroll expenses, along with utilities of $73,169.31; vending expenses of $3,221.91; and depreciation expenses of $2,625.60. 

It reported a net income of $8,814.79.