Residents are being asked to think 20 to 30 years down the road to what the community might need in the way of recreation facilities.
The Similkameen Recreation Commission issued a press release earlier this week outlining options selected residents have a chance to consider in an upcoming online survey.
The commission has identified 1,850 households total in Areas B, G, and Keremeos who’s residents own a home and who live in the home. Those residents will be receiving cards in the upcoming week detailing how they can access the survey.
“The reason the survey is going out is over a period of time the public may come and bring to our attention and it happens at the end of every swim season, ‘eh, what about a new pool. How about an indoor pool or a new outdoor pool.’ And they do this too when the ice rink closes,” Karl Donoghue, facility manager at the Similkameen Recreation Centre said.
Donoghue said staff takes input from the public and provides it to the recreation commission regularly. The recreation commission, made up of a volunteer board, decided to do a proper survey.
“They just felt that this is the time to bring it to the public’s attention and look at what direction we want to go in,” he said.
Included in the survey are questions around five projects the commission is considering including an indoor pool, new outdoor pool, roof over the rink, expansion of the fitness room or an upgrade to the bowling lanes.
The survey includes rough pricing for each possible project.
“We wanted people to have a real snapshot of what this might mean,” he said.
The details of the projects are listed in a letter to the editor on page 7 of this paper.
Donoghue did tell the Review that the current outdoor pool the area is using is coming to the end of its life. He could not estimate how many years it had left but did say staff have been “babying it for years.”
“We maintain it as best we can. We have funding to replace the mechanical equipment, water heater, filters that kind of thing in the reserves. But if we had a catastrophic failure we wouldn’t have the funds to repair it,” he said.
The commission states in it’s press release that the capital needed to build a new outdoor pool would be about $3 million while indoor pool would cost $5.7 million and increased operating costs of more than $250,000.