Calgary Stampede gets keys to expanded BMO Centre, key milestone in $500M project
The keys to Calgary’s new BMO Centre were given to the Calgary Stampede Wednesday after four years of construction.
Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC) and the Stampede say the project has now moved into its final stages, preparing to begin operating following a June grand opening.
The $500 million expansion pushes the building to more than one million square feet, which will allow for the hosting of up to 33,000 people at once. Calgary’s convention centre is now the largest in western Canada.
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To prepare for those crowds, Stampede employees will soon start loading in furniture, dishes, cutlery and catering equipment, including 6,500 stacking chairs, 600 round banquet tables, 500 rectangular tables, 7,680 forks and knives, and 6,200 dinner plates.
Diving more into the numbers, officials say over two million construction hours put in by over 5,000 tradespeople got the job done. The construction of more than 565,000 of new space took 10,000 metric tonnes of steel, and 2.4 million square feet of drywall.
The project was funded in equal parts by the Government of Canada, the Government of Alberta and the City of Calgary.
