A proposed downtown concert hall in Ottawa hasn't been able to secure the sponsors it needed to go ahead despite funding from all three levels of government, and a city councillor said she wants to find out why.

"I think that it probably wouldn't be bad to ask our staff to do a bit of a post-mortem on this to try and get a better idea of how something that … seemed so close just never made it past the finish line," said Coun. Maria McRae before the Thursday deadline for the concert hall's backers to find all the funding they needed.

The $38-million project was being led by the Ottawa Chamber Music Society, which announced Tuesday that things were "not looking particularly good" for the 925-seat practice, performance and recording space.

As of Thursday, the society had not announced the names of any leading private sponsors willing to pay $18 million in costs that won't be covered by the $5.5 million commitment from the city, $6.1 million from the province and up to $8 million from the federal government.

The facility was to have been built at Elgin and Gloucester Streets as part of a private residential and commercial development by Morguard Corp.

Coun. Diane Holmes, who represents the ward where the concert hall was to be built, said its failure is a "big, big disappointment."

"It is so difficult to get three governments all agreeing to put their money into a project and then find out the group has not been able to get the private sector," she said. "That is really a tragedy for the downtown."

Fundraising started too late: councillor

This week, the president of the society's board, Colin Cooke, said the society had no full-time fundraisers, and there was only so much they could do with a team that "ebbed and flowed" despite the high quality of the members.

"This has been put together on the back of a small arts organization with very limited resources," he said. "And so a tremendous amount of this effort had to be borne on the shoulders of volunteers. Can you press volunteers harder? Maybe. I have no idea."

Holmes said she believes part of the problem is the group didn't start looking for private funding soon enough.

"You have to spend a year or two getting a corporate sponsor, cultivating contacts, and you need the right people to be making those contacts so it's really a long-term investment," she said. "So I felt that they had not left themselves enough time to do that kind of work."

She added that the concert hall wasn't the society's focus immediately after its founder and artistic director Julian Armour quit in March 2007.

At that time, the society put most of their efforts toward making sure the annual Ottawa Chamber Music Festival went ahead, she said, and didn't appear to turn their attention to the concert hall until later.

Armour had also originally led the concert hall project, and after his departure, some councillors criticized the shortage of leadership among the concert hall's backers.

"I think this is something else that hurts them very much," said Coun. Jan Harder at a meeting about the concert hall last November.

The Ottawa Chamber Music Society had long blamed its problems on the fact that sponsors wanted to see a commitment of federal funding, which they did not get until November 2007.