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CUplex facilities closed for majority of long weekend

Mar 30, 2018 | 8:00 AM

Families looking for something to do together this Easter long weekend might have to rule out a visit to North Battleford’s CUplex as both the Field House and Aquatic Centre will be closed for most of the weekend.

Both facilities will be closed Friday, Sunday and Monday. The Field House will be open from 2:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday, while the Aquatic centre will be open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. the same day.

Other communities, like Yorkton and Melfort’s, aquatic centres will remain open all weekend. According to management at Northern Lights Palace in Melfort, the facility sees a lot more traffic during stat holidays.

According to the director of leisure services for North Battleford, a recent study showed there was room to make up for budget shortfalls by staying closed during stat holidays.

“This was presented as budget cutbacks when the provincial government provided much less money to the city,” Bill Samborski said. “We took a look at the usage over the last five years and found some opportunities where it wasn’t as busy as one would think and decided to close down certain days, especially around stats.”

Samborski said administration compared traffic on statutory holidays to the rest of the year and decided they didn’t want to close down a weeknight throughout the year to save the money needed to make budget.

He added when the CUplex first opened, the facility was available every stat holiday except Christmas Day.

“We gave that a run for a few years and then shrunk back on the days and watched it closely. We realized we just weren’t as busy as we were expecting, yet we were still worried about the regional draw. What happens with Easter is Good Friday is a stat and a lot of people think Easter Sunday and Monday are stats and of course they are not. We believed that had an effect on the operations.”

Samborski said he’d love nothing more than to get the funding from the province back so the situation could be revisited by city council and the facilities could stay open on holidays. He added the decisions were made to minimize impact on full time jobs and operations year round.

“As much as it might be an inconvenience this weekend, as bad as it is, it is better than a weekly inconvenience year round,” he said. “The fact is this situation was driven by the loss of provincial revenue. We didn’t expect people to be excited about the situation. In fact it is good if they’re disappointed because we want our services to be valued.”

Samborski said after the weekend both the Field House and Aquatic Centre will go back to business as usual.

 

greg.higgins@jpbg.ca

On Twitter @realgreghiggins