There is no doubt the Alberta 55 Plus Summer Games last summer had a profoundly positive impact on the host communities — and the specific benefits have been many.
Athletes got the opportunity to enjoy the spirit of friendly competition and life-long athleticism that the Games embody, the community got to showcase what it has to offer and volunteers came together to make it all happen.
And now, thanks to a combination of good fiscal management and the many contributions from local businesses and municipalities, there is a huge chunk of change to dole out to community groups to create a lasting legacy from this event.
Unfortunately, it seems as if the entire process for deciding how to award the Legacy Grants has been confusing and not always popular, in the cases where it was even understood at all.
It absolutely makes sense to provide the grants in an equitable way to organizations within the four host communities — Westlock, Westlock County, Barrhead and the County of Barrhead — considering without these four municipalities coming together the Games would never have been hosted here.
But the process of having individual municipalities make recommendations to the legacy committee, which in turn could choose to accept or refuse those recommendations before making its own final recommendation to the board as a whole, has resulted in some unnecessarily divisive attitudes amongst the different municipalities.
The fact that the process has been cloaked in secrecy, and inconsistent secrecy at that — some municipalities kept their recommendations under wraps while others were open about them — and even at the very end with the decision being made but the information about it only slowly trickling out is perplexing.
Asking four municipalities to agree on a way to handle the recommendations and how to handle getting that information out to the public wasn’t the best choice. The final decision was entrusted to the Games committee, which by all measures did a fantastic job, and that’s where the process should taken place throughout.
Fortunately, when all is said and done, people won’t remember how it all came about — just that there has been $350,000 reinvested into these communities for the future.
