Lack of ice forces Wichita Ice Center to cancel hockey camp, skating. When will it reopen?

The Wichita Ice Center won’t have ice until at least early August, forcing the company that manages the city-owned facility to cancel or postpone two weeks worth of public skating and at least one major event that was expected to draw visitors from across the country.

Wichita Ice Center General Manager Sean O’Reilly, of Rink Management Service Corp., said at a news conference last week that he hoped the ice making equipment could be fixed in a couple of days. But his prognosis proved to be overly optimistic and has now shifted to at least two weeks, he said in a phone interview with The Eagle on Monday.

“It has not been a good few days for us over here at the ice rink, and we’re pretty disappointed that we can’t serve our customers the way we should,” O’Reilly said. “And we’re working as hard as we can. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good situation.”

The Ice Center’s chiller has been limping along since last July, working just well enough to maintain ice on the city’s Olympic-sized skating rink but not well enough to keep ice on an NHL-sized hockey rink. Last week, more equipment failed.

“With the chilling tower working at half capacity, you can only run one compressor at a time,” O’Reilly said. “And so, normally, if it’s working at 100 percent, both compressors can be running, so they take the load off of each other. But since it’s only running at 50 percent, it could only sustain one compressor. So one compressor was running nonstop . . . through the end of June, and then it started acting wonky. So then we switched over to the second compressor, and it ran the remainder of the time, and was basically on 24/7, and it got to the point where it couldn’t keep up anymore either. That’s kind of the timeline.”

New parts are expected to arrive early this week, and repair work will begin Wednesday. The repairs on the compressors are expected to take five days. After that, it takes five to seven days for the rink to fully freeze.

“What we’re trying to do is get the ice up in time for the beginning of August,” O’Reilly said. “That’s kind of what — and, again, I’m a pretty optimistic person, so that’s the plan.”

O’Reilly said the city has had to make some emergency parts orders.

“The city’s been great,” O’Reilly said. “It’s just a matter of once the ice goes down, there’s still a process that it takes to rebuild that, and unfortunately during the press conference I was confident that what we were doing was going to work, and I was wrong. So it’s going to take a little bit longer than I first thought.”

The equipment failure spells trouble for a Black Hills Hockey Academy camp scheduled for next week, which was expected to draw hundreds of youth hockey players from across the country to Wichita. Black Hills was not immediately available for comment. O’Reilly said he had not yet told the director of the camp that it would be canceled.

“Right now, I don’t have a good answer,” O’Reilly said. “We’re working on a solution, but I haven’t — unfortunately, I’ve been talking to other people. I haven’t had an opportunity to communicate with him (the camp director) yet. If the timeline holds . . . there’s really no chance.”

Disruptions won’t end there. If the ice center reopens in August, it will close for another two weeks in mid-August as the city replaces a different broken piece of ice-making equipment — a cooling tower that has left the ice center’s chiller operating at half capacity for over a year. O’Reilly said he had hoped the compressors would hold up until the new tower arrived.

The City Council approved a $238,610 bid for a new cooling tower for the chiller in February, and it was initially scheduled to be replaced in mid-July. But RMS pushed back that date to August due to several events scheduled for July, including the hockey camp, O’Reilly said.

“I would say we were optimistic that we were going to make it through to August,” O’Reilly said. “And, unfortunately, due to some lack of preventative maintenance before we were involved in the rink, it failed.”

It’s the latest blow to an ice center that has been limping along for more than a year due to equipment failure that the city blames on Genesis Health Clubs, a company it put in control of managing the facility for ten years from 2012 to 2022, according to a lawsuit recently filed by the city.

The city’s lawsuit says Genesis and its owner Rodney Steven II were responsible for maintenance and repairs at the ice center but failed to maintain the ice making equipment and, in at least one case, caused the equipment to fail. Genesis used untreated water, causing a calcium buildup in the ice making equipment, the city contends.

The city also blames the continuing problems on two contractors hired to fix the calcium buildup in the chiller: The Waldinger Corporation and Kan-Tech, Inc. The city added Waldinger and Kan-Tech as defendants in the lawsuit last week, claiming the two companies were negligent by “improperly applying an acid treatment to the ice making equipment . . . causing a deterioration of the equipment to the point of failure and a breaching its duty of reasonable care owed to the City in servicing its equipment.”

The contractors were not immediately available for comment Monday evening.

Genesis, in a counter lawsuit, blamed the city for a lack of upkeep at the Ice Center. The company’s filing says Genesis informed the city of problems at the Ice Center, including the ice making equipment, black mold, HVAC problems and other issues, but the city failed to properly maintain, repair or replace the equipment.

Genesis also claimed in court filings that it submitted a bid for a new chiller in 2019 from a company that had significant experience and offered a 5-year warranty but the city instead “made the baffling decision to spend approximately twice as much in taxpayer dollars on a chiller from a company that had never installed one before and only offered a 1-year warranty.”

“The chiller is now out of warranty and is already having mechanical issues, including those for which the City claims Genesis is responsible,” the counterclaims say.

Last January, the City Council voted to end its contract with Genesis. The city later turned over operations to Rink Management Service Corp. But RMS has struggled to operate due to the failing ice-making equipment.

“Unfortunately, they (the ice making equipment) weren’t treated very well before we got here,” O’Reilly said. “And the thing, is once we took over, we’ve been doing the preventative maintenance on this stuff, and we’ve been doing what should keep it going. But we can’t account for stuff that happened before our watch, I guess, is what I would say.

“I hate having to have this conversation. I feel it’s my responsibility. I know ultimately, it’s not, but I feel very responsible for it. I hate the fact that I have to turn people away,” he said. “I do want to thank people for their patience as we work through this. I’m probably as disappointed as anybody, but I appreciate people’s patience and understanding as we work through this.”