With all of the pressure city council and staff are putting on the taxpayers of Prince George over the last number of months regarding the replacement of the downtown pool and the firehall, in my opinion, it is time for the taxpayers to stand up, be counted and say how the replacements of these two venues is absolutely wrong.
Unfortunately it has become all too common place with so many items and things to become the throwaway generation without any concern and consideration how aging facilities that have good bones can be repaired and updated for far cheaper than replacement.
With that, I shall first talk about the Four Seasons Pool. Firstly, nobody else has mentioned that it is currently close to meeting the 200-year flood plane height and the new proposal as it is shown certainly doesn't. To start with people put new roofs on their buildings every day and pools are relined on a regular basis to stop seepage. The biggest issue in addition to that is to address the entrance to the facility. Being a winter city, an all-weather enclosed elevator for handicap access and an escalator going both up and down would solve the access problem. Done properly it would not have to take any more space from the parking lot than the existing entrance.
The new proposed facility in the Day's Inn parking lot would destroy more insufficient parking for downtown institutions. As it is now, that parking is used by a major corporate business being Telus and others that give their employees some paid parking close to their institutions. I am sure if one doesn't mind the walk users of the pool could park there as well. If repairs and renovations could be done for less than half of the cost of a new facility, think how much more bang we could get for our buck to put towards other expenses.
In my opinion, city council has their blinders on in not thinking and planning long term as this city being the northern capital of B.C. could well become the next Surrey. If we renovated and updated the current pool and planned over the next number of years, there could be a pool in College Heights and the Hart as well.
Regarding the fire hall, having just been through it last Saturday, it has good bones. The call centre should be taken right out of it and reorganize a lot of the rest. Fire Hall No. 1 could have the existing trucks minus the ladder truck and in a fire to make efficient response time, those existing trucks could get to the site and start tackling the fire early and at the same time laying out hoses to prepare for the arrival of the ladder truck from Ospika. Fire Hall No. 1 could well be updated and renovated and to better meet a lot of their needs and Ospika has lots of available land that one side could be taken out of the existing building to improve space for the larger trucks.
In the main scheme of things, consideration should be given to a new hall and facility in the industrial site south of town that could be state of the art with an in-house training facility for staff to improve themselves and as well provide a place for other crews to come to town for training, which they would pay for and make our facility a revenue generating institution as well.
At the end of the day, we still have to pay for our nice new RCMP facility and to continue with throwing away old repairable institutions instead of making them last is wrong. We should not be leaving debt that our kids, grandkids and their kids have to pay for. It is already tough enough for the new generations to pay for their own house, let alone being burdened with unnecessary high taxes to add to their already lean budgets.
Stan Wheeldon
Prince George
