CALGARY, Alta. — The Nov. 20 grand opening of the Alberta Motor Transport Association’s new Centre of Excellence was an event years in the making and featured an “all star cast” of industry, government and association personnel who turned out to celebrate the event.

The approximately 17,000 sq.-ft. facility at 285005 Wrangler Way in the Patton Industrial Park, seconds east of Calgary in the County of Rocky View, gives the AMTA much more and much-needed elbow room as well as more and better facilities. It also places them much closer to a broad cross-section of the people and companies with whom they deal on a daily basis.

Among the dignitaries on hand to help kick open the doors – and who had the honour of cutting the official ceremonial cake – were AMTA president Richard Warnock, Alberta Transportation’s Roger Clarke, Robert Feagan of Alberta Employment and Immigration and Ken Vertz of the WCB. Each said a few words before they collaborated on their “knife-wielding ceremony.”

“This building has been in the works since way before I joined the organization in the late 1990s,” AMTA executive director Mayne Root, who also emceed the event, said. According to Root, the Board of Directors had been envisioning such a facility since the 1980s but that, for one reason or another, it never came to fruition. Things finally started moving forward about five years ago, he says, when the Board asked the staff to put together a plan.

Root and the late John Tessier, the much beloved manager of injury reduction and training at the time – and the man to whom the large training facility is dedicated – drew up a plan that included recommendations for what the association really needed, taking into consideration such factors as the space that would be required to house the amount and type of services they wanted to provide. The next major hurdle was to find the funding, but once that was successful the AMTA and its partner in the project – Spacemakers Construction Services – broke ground in March of 2009, with the move to the new Centre of Excellence completed on Oct. 20.  

For more on the new facility, check out the January issue of Truck West.