Completion Delayed for Singapore's Sports Hub

Singapore's hopes to use the 2013 South-East Asia Games to showcase the its new Sports Hub sporting precinct, the centrepiece of which will be a 55,000-seat stadium, have been hit by construction delays and financial troubles.
With the delays likely to mean the precinct will not be complete until 2013, senior Singaporean sports officials have privately raised the possibility that the Republic may have to forgo hosting the 2013 Games. Should that happen, it would be a major blow to the island state, which had hoped to use the biennial multi-sport extravaganza to showcase the world-class facility.
Currently, the Singapore Sports Hub Consortium (SSHC) hopes to sign the final contract with the Singapore Sports Council (SSC) by year-end, according to a recent statement by Ludwig Reichhold, Managing Director of construction firm Dragages Singapore.
Dragages is the lead agency of the consortium that trumped bids from two other groups in January last year. The contract was to have been signed in March last year but was delayed by financial and legal issues.
The precinct development will begin with the demolition of the current National Stadium by the first quarter of next year - a process that is expected to take about three months.
Construction of the Sports Hub can then begin and will take about three years to finish. However, according to an SSC source "even with this timeline, a completion date of mid-2013 is still touch and go.
The Sports Hub, the centrepiece of which is a 55,000-seater dome-shaped National Stadium with a retractable roof, is a public-private partnership (PPP) project wherein the Singapore Government will pay the SSHC (which will design, build, and operate the facility) a monthly unitary payment throughout the project's 25-year term once the final contract is signed.
However, since the project was announced in 2005, its completion date has been pushed back repeatedly - from 2010, to 2011, then 2012 and now 2013.
This has kept sporting enthusiasts hoping to use the facilities, like a public water sports centre and indoor aquatic centre, waiting.
It also means a longer wait for Singaporeans to watch star sporting events like the Twenty20 cricket matches, which the SSHC had promised to bring to the hub. The delays have also partly stemmed from the SSHC's difficulty in raising funds as financial institutions tightened lending requirements following the economic downturn late last year. The finances for the Hub have not been settled but a London-based publication, Infrastructure Journal, said in April that the Singapore Government stood ready to step in and bail out the struggling project.
As a result, SSHC is believed to be considering the idea of building some facilities at a later stage so as to lower construction costs at the start. According to the SSC's tender specifications, the 35 hectare site must have a 6,000-capacity indoor aquatic centre, a 3,000-capacity multi-purpose arena, a public water sports centre, and 41,000sqm of shopping, leisure and dining facilities, on top of the new National Stadium.
Facilities in the SSHC's proposal which could be dropped or built later include a whitewater rafting facility, an indoor karting arena, and a water adventure playground with flumes and slides.
The Singapore Sports Hub was featured in the March/April 2007 issue of Australasian Leisure Management.