Calgary city council chamber was a beehive of activity on Thursday, as amateur sports organizations spokespeople, as well as youngsters who participate in sports at that level, spoke to the Community Development Committee (CDC), making their cases for the City of Calgary to open its wallet and build more recreation facilities.
City administration, in its GamePLAN document, laid out three financial options for committee members to consider increasing and maintaining recreational facilities, on four key amenity types: aquatics and fitness, arenas, athletic parks and fieldhouses, over a 25-year period.
The three funding options were given names by administration: Going Under, with funding between $0 to $30 million; Staying afloat, $100 to $500 million; and Making Waves, $200 to $250 million. All three options are yearly expenditures.
Administration recommended Making Waves as the standard for public recreation facilities and amenities and a series of presenters in chambers urged council to vote for it over the other two.
According to the document, Calgary and its partners, such as social recreation organizations and community associations, operate 250 public recreation facilities, including aquatic and fitness centres, leisure centres, outdoor pools, arenas, indoor and outdoor sport fields and courts, skateparks, arts centres, golf courses and the Glenmore Sailing School.
All of the facilities are owned by the city and located on city-owned land. The targetted facilities represent the majority of Calgary’s capital asset value for public recreation, combining the largest range of structured sport and recreation opportunities in the city, according to the document.
Ward 13 Cllr. Dan McLean says, despite the woke language in the document, “the intent behind GamePLAN is good, because we do need more recreational facilities. We’ve really dropped the ball for the last several years or decade or more with our pools and recreation facilities.”
McLean says the city collects a lot of tax money from Calgarians and wonders where it all goes.
“It’s not going to recreational facilities. We did get a chart about how far behind we are in the city, and we’re way, way behind on pools, soccer fields. We need dozens of them.”
McLean says the city’s ‘climate change’ policies have been a hinderance.
“Maybe we have a pool that is still usable and maybe leaking some heat out of it, that they were going to shut down early, rather than fix it. That was Inglewood Pool, they were going to close that down early, but I think we’ve stalled it.”
“But there’s a lot of different facilities that they’re not using or maybe at the end of their lives too soon, just because it’s not as energy efficient as they’d like it to be. There are some solutions but they’ve carved out all these bureaucracies and they say because of climate and anti-racism and DEI, nothing gets done.”
“We have civic partners coming out our ying (sic), like libraries and the arts community where we shell out millions of dollars. We have agency overlapping agencies overlapping agencies and they all need to be streamlined and the money put into things that people need and want, like a soccer field.”
Look beyond or go over the bureaucracies, adds McLean.
“I feel we should team up with the private sector. I’ve always said we could use the private sector. Maybe we could give them the land and throw in some of our money, then build a facility that we can name after whatever private sector business partners with us. I’m working on that right now.”
McLean says people are tired of huge bloated government agencies.
"Whether it’s federal, provincial or municipal they’re focusing on growing their bureaucracies, keeping their jobs instead of spending it on services people want and need. We need a healthy society and we need to get more facilities.”
“I’m behind GamePLAN, which is just a plan to get recreational facilities and build more of them.”
After a debate about GamePLAN on Thursday, all seven CPC members voted to send the document to a regular session of council in the future.