The City is looking to hear from the community on the future of two recreation facilities.

In a 2019 Community Facilities Assessment Report, it was found that the Centennial Civic Centre, which was built in 1965, was nearing the end of its usable life within in the next two to four years.  That report also found a need for  a new or enhanced aquatics centre to compliment BioClean Aquatic Centre, due to public demand.

As a response, the city has opened an information session and online survey that the public can use to view and vocalize their opinion.

Director of Recreation and Culture services Joel Turcotte says the survey breaks down several different possibilities for the future of these facilities.

“It walks through the questions of what should a new arena look like, what kind of amenities do people want, what should an aquatic centre look like, what are the amenities they want. It then walks through the different options of location, different options of what the buildings could look like, as well as gives kind of a high figure price of what those buildings could look like, or cost in the future.”

Turcotte adds that some of these hypothetical aquatic centre possibilities include adding more swimming lanes, renovating the current pool versus building a new one,  building more features like slides or extra hot-tubs and making the change rooms larger, for example. For the Civic Centre, possibilities include increasing seat capacity in a new arena, creating an ice surface that could be split and new locations.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic putting limitations on the size of social gatherings, the information session and survey are both being hosted online until June 5th.

“It brings you through a lot of videos, and a lot of questions,” Turcotte explains, “So that we can gain the knowledge of what the community is looking for. Hopefully, when we have that, we can use all that information to wrap that up into a report.”

The survey is now open on the City’s website.