ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. (WANE) --- The Fort Wayne Komets will get a new ice rink to skate on. Friday, the Allen County Commissioners approved spending more than $6 million to build a new ice plant at the Allen County Coliseum. Work on the new ice is scheduled to begin next year on June 9 and finish November 1, according to Melanie Carney, the Coliseum’s Executive Vice President and General Manager. The Komets will still begin next year’s season in October, but spend the first two weeks on the road, Carney said. Ice plants are expected to last between 20 and 30 years. The Coliseum’s existing system was installed in 2002, is likely to break down and that can happen unpredictably, like at a hockey game. To avoid that, Corporate Design & Management in Auburn and Cimco, out of Alabama, have been hired to build the new CO2-based plant. The contract approved Friday describes the work as an ice floor replacement and ice plant equipment installation. The actual amount is $6,463,100. Ice is always built on a concrete floor and, below the concrete, there are 200-foot runs of copper steel piping that process CO2 through the system. The piping is connected to chillers and compressors that lower the temperature of the CO2 to 14 degrees. Once the temperature is down to 14 degrees, ice crews apply a fine, thin mist of water on top of it. They let that water freeze and repeat the process until there’s about an inch of ice, Carney explained. The process takes two or three days. The floor has to be painted white, then all of the lines painted and the gold crease. Crews also put down the logos, Carney said. “I kind of think of it like lasagna. You build up the very thin layers and then you end up with a great product for the Komets to play on,” Carney said. The new system will be CO2-based and an improvement over other systems that use glycol and ammonia. The project originally was supposed to cost around $5 million, but when the Coliseum sent out for bids last year, no one responded. Contractors said with supply chain issues, they couldn’t meet the timeline needed to get it done before the hockey season began, Carney said. With the construction team in place, Carney doesn’t foresee those types of problems. Cimco has installed 50% of the world’s ice plants including 23 professional ice plants in the U.S. and 60 CO2 systems, Carney told the commissioners. The current system has not broken down, but repair and maintenance crews who work on all the equipment at the Coliseum keep track of age and use. “We have a large capital list and we keep track of how old everything is,” Carney said. The ice is installed twice a year and is removed when the Mizpah Shrine circus comes. “We’ll take the ice out and have the elephants come out and do their thing and reinstall it,” Carney said. The ice is an important asset for the Coliseum, Carney said. “There’s intentionality there. We want to make sure the Komets stay in Fort Wayne and so to continue hosting them, we’ve got to be able to put a good slab of ice for them to win some games on.”