CBBarnett
Senior Member
I am curious what this plan will actually propose and how that plan will manifest into actual facilities. Much of the issues with distribution and cost of recreation facilities isn't really a byproduct of public demands for stuff, but more interpretation of those demands combined with deliberate funding, operating and facility design assumptions IMO.From some councilors I head on the issue, the reason they didn't want to keep Inglewood open was because they want to fund this new GamePlan that's supposed to come out in the next couple of months. It's supposed to be a new rec centre investment strategy
GamePLAN for Facilities
Seeking public input on where, when and how the City of Calgary should invest in publicly-funded recreation facilities and amenities.engage.calgary.ca
The bloated, mega-rec centres of the past 25 years were a byproduct of these factors. A generous take - they are huge capacity, attractive and modern, some of the best facilities in the country for mixed recreation opportunities. Many people asked for them and they got what they asked for. Less generously - and more accurately to me - we only could afford to build 4 of them because they are huge. It's not an inherent good thing we have the "1st and 2nd largest recreation YMCAs in the world!" as it was celebrated repeatedly.
The third-party operating model dictates what services can be offered, while design assumptions result in a facility so large it can't fit anywhere but a greenfield plot of land with low land costs. Despite every plan and policy talking about equitable access and public recreation being a critical service - we created $500M of recreation facilities scattered in inaccessible areas, at high costs to average users to access. We then tried to address this criticism with subsidized user passes - nice gesture, but never enough to overcome nearly impossible transportation barriers to access any of the new facilities. If you don't have a car, these recreation centres are not built for you.
Meanwhile, commitment to this facility design and operating model undercut investment in established facilities during the same era. Not only was all capital tied up on the major new facilities, smaller facilities with fewer amenities start looking deficient in comparison. Recreation starts seeing huge attendance growth in the new facilities and slower declines in older ones - not surprising, as anyone who didn't mind the drive to a fancier facility could do that, or if you a youth sport organization would go to the new large facilities instead of the old ones where the capacity exists.
Old facilities can't expand because the whole model favours new development, not retrofits, and land costs are too high to have some of the space-consuming amenities now considered standard. The result is a chain of decisions that close all the inner city pools in an awkward, staggered fashion to awkwardly glom them onto MNP Lindsay Park as the inner city's only facility that conforms to the mega-facility model.
TL/DR:
It really matters what this recreation plan optimizes for - not just about what sports and amenities are on offer as a "standard", but also what the plan says about "acceptable" levels of proximity, cost, amenity design, distribution and operating model. Our current model creates attractive, giant facilities but makes many of these other factors worse - worse access, worse affordability, worse distribution.
