Big losses force sale of Charlottesville ice park

The owners of the Charlottesville Ice Park are putting the Downtown Mall anchor up for sale and it will likely close later this year unless a buyer comes along.

Co-owners Bruce and Roberta Williamson, in a Friday letter to staff, wrote that the rink’s monetary losses have exceeded $850,000 since 2005 and that they would likely exceed $1 million if the ice park continued to operate for another year.

“The reality is that the Central Virginia area, while being enthusiastic about the rink to a degree, does not have enough people interested in skating often enough to support the operation,” the owners wrote.

The rink will be listed for $4.1 million.

“It’s been on our minds for quite some time. It’s a very hard decision to make,” Roberta Williamson said Sunday. “We wish we didn’t have to do this.”

The ice park was co-developed by Colin Rolph and Lee Danielson, the duo who also brought the Regal Cinemas movie theater to the Downtown Mall. The arrival of those establishments is seen now as part of the reason why the city’s then-struggling main commercial area was eventually revived.

Since it opened in 1996, the 31,000-square-foot building has provided skating space for area recreational leagues and the University of Virginia’s Men’s Ice Hockey Club. Team founder Roger Voisinet said Sunday that the rink’s closure would probably mean the end for UVa’s program.

“There’s rinks but they’re all an hour or an hour-and-a-half away,” he said, naming two places, one outside of Richmond and another in Lynchburg.

“I’ve been thinking about this for 10 years,” he said of the impending closure. “Of course, you never know when this is going to happen, but I was prepared.”

The Williamsons purchased the ice park property and business, as well as additional equipment, for about $3.1 million in 2003, a time when it was also in danger of closing. Two years later, they entered a five-year lease with BMD Land Trust that was needed to operate the business.

Williamson said that they would have to decide by the end of May whether to extend that lease for another five years, through November 2015, but by that time the rink’s losses could easily reach $2 million.

“One family sustaining these kinds of losses is pretty difficult,” she said.

The number of employees at the rink varies, but Williamson said it runs between 20 and 40, with more staff working during the winter season. They estimated that the ice park would need about 20,000 additional public skating visits per year for it to break even.

Because the ice park is hosting the ice skating portion of the Coventry Commonwealth Games in June, it will remain open through that time. In the meantime, Williamson said she hoped that a private entity or group of residents would purchase the rink and business to sustain its operations once that event culminates.

“We have high hopes that a group of other people will look at our staff and look at the business model and say OK, maybe there’s something here we can do,” she said.

“I cherish it,” Williamson said of the rink. “I really do.”