Dennis Galbraith was part of the original team working on the Oakville Community Club project for about 18 years. He was ecstatic to see Friday's announcement of $2.02 million for the Oakville Community Centre/Daycare. 

"We're just over-the-moon excited to be at this milestone point," says Galbraith. "It's a wonderful feeling. Our engineering and architectural drawings are almost complete. Our tendering process will start very shortly. We'll probably look for our first thawed ground in spring of 2023 to start construction now, and maybe even have a sod-turning event."

He notes it's hard to project a timeline due to the magnitude of the project in such a smaller community.

"It's not like a major corporation that just opens its bank account," says Galbraith. "We had to get consensus within the community of what we needed, what the community wanted to go forward for decades in terms of infrastructure, and then we had to get a place and buy-in from people to support the construction costs."

Galbraith says all the dominoes fell into place in the last few months to get them to this point where they're ready to start. 

The site is located on the east side of their arena at the very east end of town.

"We have a 5-acre site there," adds Galbraith. "The Community Centre at the front part of the site. It'll be geothermally heated and cooled. The way energy prices are going, we're a community that supports the buildings on our own. So, anything we can do to minimize our long-term operational costs is well worth doing. It could be a zero-carbon footprint building at some point."