Public Access to Pool
I will preface this letter with full disclosure, I am not a big user of the swimming pool, but as summer slowly goes by I can not for the life of me get my head around the scheduling that is presently in place!
It is Monday, July 27 and we are about to head into a week of 30 plus temperatures and yet the pool hours will accommodate the public after 4:30 p.m. Granted there are swimming lessons, but on a quick drive by today there were approximately 8 people in the pool. This is not a new schedule but a schedule that has gone through the month of July.
For a facility that would like to bring in revenues, I cannot get my head around the logic in having no public access to a recreation facility during the most prime hours of the day. All the children of the community that would make use of hot afternoons are denied, outsiders from surrounding communities and R.M.’s that may make an afternoon of it cannot, many of those accessing our Regional park cannot! How does this make any sense, as revenues that could be generated for the pool are let slip by. But fear not, as 5 o’clock approaches, as the day starts to cool as most Saskatchewan evenings do....now we will open to the public! Hopefully for those wishing to cool off, the hot afternoons will not have stolen all of their energy.
I will concede that children’s swimming lessons are extremely important. However, so is the operation of the pool in such a manner that revenues are generated, and those revenues are generated by having the facility accessible during the optimum hours of the day! We want more people to purchase season passes, more visitors to take advantage of a fine facility but the current schedule hinders that greatly. It is not a good sign that there are often more people on the river during hot afternoons, a place that for safety reasons is not the alternative we want to push them towards.
I implore pool management to take a hard look at scheduling, there has to be a better solution.
Bob Stephenson
Outlook, SK
