Time to say yes to aquatic centre

If Red Deer really gets behind the project quickly, our city population will be around 125,000 or so by the time we open up a proper aquatic centre with a competition-ready pool, to host the 2019 Canada Winter Games.

If we decide we'd rather pay an extra $45 million to begin the pool on the long schedule — 10 years from next year — we'll be a city of 150,000 and probably the largest in Canada with this extreme shortage of athletic facilities.

Do they give gold medals for that?

In the meantime, all that horrible debt people complained about in the last municipal election campaign will continue to cost each city residence a whopping $4.26 a month to service.

Talk about things running away from us. If we continue to refuse to build and upgrade our public fitness infrastructure in pace with our growth, even one-per-cent inflation will be able to run away from us.

The proposal to put a new aquatic centre on the city's 10-year capital plan, forwarded by councillors Lynne Mulder and Paul Harris, has two parts.

As Harris described in a phone conversation, one part is to say yes to building the pool. The other part is to put together a group with broad representation to plan how it will work. That group would include city and county levels of government, plus the hospitality and tourism industry and sports stakeholders (think Red Deer College), just for starters.

There are a whole lot of community areas that stand to gain from Red Deer having first-class (as opposed to what we have now) athletics infrastructure. The more stakeholders — not just athletes and people interested in a fit lifestyle — the more opportunities to share sponsorship.

Red Deer's bid to host the Winter Games puts some urgency into the conversation. If we say yes to a plan to have the pool ready by 2019, not only will it cost about $45 million less to build than under the long plan, but Red Deer will have access to additional provincial and federal funding and sponsorship tied to the Games.

That's one of the reasons Canada promotes national Summer and Winter Games in the first place.

We all like to see Canada's best athletes in action, but they need top-level opportunities to train and compete. By moving hosting opportunities around the nation for events like the Winter Games, Canada spreads the chance to place legacy projects around the nation, to allow athletes everywhere to train and to grow.

If we get excited for the Olympics every other year, one reason we can do so is because of the legacies of provincial- and national-level summer and winter events all around the country. We don't reserve the Olympic dreams to the largest cities far away, they grow in places like Red Deer.

But only if we choose to allow it. If we say no, the legacy projects — and the funding and sponsorships for them — will go to places with more faith in the future.

So far, there really only exists a plan outline and some artist's renditions of what the aquatic centre we describe might look like.

It will go in Rotary Recreation Park, in the space just south of the existing Recreation Centre. The two buildings will be connected.

In fact, all the sports, recreation and cultural centres in the immediate area will be connected.

From the Public Market, the Arena and Kinex, with the Pidherney Curling Centre, past the indoor and outdoor tennis courts, past the aquatic centre, the museum, Golden Circle, speedskating oval and splash park — all these will be on a promenade that connects to Alexander Way.

The city's cultural master plan says that new major projects need to connect with our parks system, and areas where people already naturally gather. Like the splash park, like the Public Market, like the Red Deer and District Museum and Heritage Square. And soon, from Barrett Park, all the way to the river valley.

Quite the legacy.

We already have a committee gathering sponsorships for the Winter Games. Adding an aquatic centre in conjunction to that opens up wider corporate and private sponsorship opportunities. Plus, there would be federal and provincial funding sources available, in addition to what we would get otherwise.

That's before we even begin to look at municipal debt, with a tax bill for all our existing debt that costs us less than the price of a lottery ticket per month.

Red Deerians deserve to live in a city with recreational, training and cultural infrastructure at least on par with Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Canmore and others. In fact, I suggest we can even do better.

Time to say yes.