The business plan for a new South Springbank Community Centre was given the green light by Rocky View County’s (RVC) Recreation Governance Committee on Feb. 1, but the decision came reluctantly and with plenty of fireworks.
A hearing on the proposed business case plan for a new community centre for the acreage community turned into a bit of a donnybrook with some councillors feeling the proposed business plan for the $8 million facility did not address the real needs of the community of Springbank, and others just wanting to get on with the process and work out the finer details later.
The $8 million for Phase One of the project is coming from provincial grant dollars set aside for the community of Springbank to fund some sort of legacy project. The money was granted as compensation to local citizens for the inconveniences they would experience as the province gets set to begin work on the Springbank Off-Stream Reservoir Project (SR-1) project later this year.
The first bolt in last Wednesday’s discussions was fired by Division 4 Coun. Samanntha Wright after consultant Jon Hartenberger of HarGroup Management Consultants explained what the $8 million was actually paying for. Hartenberger presented a plan which would include an event centre with room for 200 persons, a studio, and a few multi-purpose rooms.
Wright questioned whether the proper consultations had been conducted with the community after HarGroup’s analysis calculated that at peak operating times, the event centre aspect of the proposal would only see 22 per cent usage from the community, the studio would see only 10 per cent usage, and the multi-purpose rooms only see six per cent usage.
“Quite frankly, there are some really troubling numbers in there,” she said. “So we want to build an $8 million facility for an event centre which the use of prime time will be 22 per cent, studio primetime hours will be 10 per cent, and the multi-purpose rooms would be six per cent.
“Are we going into this with eyes wide closed or eyes wide open?”
Mayor and Division 3 Coun. Crystal Kissel agreed with Wright, and expressed concern the additional costs of actually servicing the currently un-serviced 75-acre site were not included in the business plan.
Kissel was told by County staff that the rough estimate to do that work would be about $8 million on top of the building cost of the community centre.
“So we would spend another $8 million to put an $8 million building on for low usage? That gives me a really interesting picture,” she said.
The mayor then wondered if the scope of the project should perhaps be altered to better reflect what a majority of Springbank residents might want instead.
“We have done about three years of comprehensive consultation with the community,” answered Hartenberger in response to Kissel’s question. “Not everybody is on the same page, most definitely... but with the advisory group and reaching out to specific, potential users of the facility, this is the model we did land on.”
Division 2 Coun. Don Kochan also felt County staff and the advisory group had done the best they could with the funds available for Phase One.
“I have very good confidence we have identified the needs,” he said. “I would hate to go back to square one and start this whole process over when we have already been without a facility for four years, and now we are going to start from scratch one?
“This is only a concept, and we are going to engage with the next step, which would be to flush out some of the logistics behind where we are going to go.”
Division 1 Coun. Kevin Hanson felt Kissel and Wright were getting too preoccupied with the details early on in the process when all the committee was being asked to do was approve a sketch of what the project may look like, not the finished portrait.
“I am hearing we have to go back to square one on the very first step on this, which is a large room with four smaller rooms,” he said.
Kissel took exception to Kochan’s and Hanson’s assertions that she wanted to go back to “square one,” but felt it was important to ask if Springbank residents were truly getting what they want out of their own legacy project.
“What do the majority want? Because I am not seeing it in the report,” she stated.
Division 5 Coun. Greg Boehlke, who also chaired the committee meeting on Feb. 1, then stepped in and asked councillors not to “go too far into the weeds on this,” but to take the consultant’s report as information or leave it by putting a motion to a vote.
Kochan moved that the committee accept the business case for the South Springbank Community Centre and have administration identity the next steps forward. Kissel then proposed a compromise amendment that administration also include in its planning the cost of fully-servicing the site.
The motion passed by a vote of 5-1, with Wright the only opposing vote. Division 6 Coun. Sunny Samra was not present for the committee meeting.
After the meeting, the Rocky View Weekly spoke with Springbank Community Association president Karin Hunter. The community association will be expected to run the new facility when it is built. The facility replaces a previous community hall run by the association that was torn down four years ago.
Hunter said her association members were not exactly happy with the business case presented to the committee by the consultant on Feb. 1.
“We would rather have something go forward than not go forward at all,” she admitted. “Was the engagement as fulsome as we have liked it? No. There were four or five meetings over a year with a very small stakeholder group. There was no broader community engagement that was taken as part of that year-long process.”
Hunter hopes now that the business case had been approved, the County will take the time to come back to the community to reconsider some of the details before construction and servicing eventually gets underway.
“The community association is expected to be operating this facility, and it is replacing our old hall, so we assume we have a role there and that we would be involved in the detailed planning,” she said. “I would say there is much more work to be done (on the design), and there is much more work to be done to say how we can make this facility the most useful possible to our community as a whole.”
