It's been a little more than two years since the town of Watertown first announced plans to build a half-a-million square foot youth sports focused events center.

“It started out as a $70 million project. Last month, we were up to like $92 million,” Town of Watertown Supervisor Joel Bartlett said, attributing the costs to "the high interest rates, supply chain shortages, lack of building materials and the the overall slowdown in the economy."

Bartlett said that initially, the leaders of the project — spearheaded by M2 Sports, which is led by former NFL and college football coach Mike Sherman — were requesting about $20 million to $25 million from the state. However, when that did not immediately happen, and financial issues compounded, things went silent.

“We have been long in the ground and under construction right now, I believe,” Bartlett said of the past two years.

But something happened recently to breathe life into the project. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced funding for a massive renovation project at the Watertown International Airport. While there, she specifically answered questions about the event center, saying she's intrigued.

“I love projects,” she said. “I love projects that bring people together, that are attractions that offer all kinds of supports and amenities.”

That, Bartlett hopes, would not only help the event center, but convince the state to go from intrigued to serious.

“We also have to make sure that there's the proper review and the scrutiny behind every one of them so we make sure that we're doing smart bets,” Hochul said, insisting the state would do due diligence on any application for funding.

“There's a $5 return for every $1 they invest. That returns through sales tax, bed tax, payroll taxes,” Bartlett said of his and developer numbers.

Bartlett said to show the state how serious the developers are, they have removed a couple of things from the project, including a swimming pool and a track which will help lower costs — and the request it needs from the state — which he says when developers officially apply, will now be somewhere between $10-12 million.

Bartlett said another reason it removed the pool was the nearby YMCA just opened a new one, and developers did not want to take away from that.

He adds he does expect the development team to wait a bit, until some of the interest rates and other costs come back down, which he believes will happen in the coming months.