Two-and-a-half-million dollars is a lot of money.
There are a many of things you could do with it. You could pave a few miles of road or build a few houses. You could event employ a school resource officer for more than a decade.
But as it happens, $2.5 million also gets you a ski chalet that will hopefully open to the public before the end of they year.
There is a debate among some ratepayers about whether spending millions dollars of public money on recreation facilities is a good thing.
We think it is.
Without the Spirit Centre, ski hill, skate park, ball diamonds, playgrounds or community halls, what is Westlock?
These facilities and spaces make our communities livable. They enhance our quality of life and they make us money.
Take the Spirit Centre for example. On any given weekend it’s visited by hundreds of people, many of them not from Westlock. They buy food in town and gas up their cars. But beyond the dollars and cents, they also make Westlock and area an attractive place to live.
You could live in Barrhead, where there is no swimming pool, or you could live in Westlock, where you can take a dip year round. You could live in Legal and play hockey in an old barn, or you can live in Westlock and play hockey in a facility that is the envy of most towns in northern Alberta.
The point is that for Westlock to be an attractive place to live and subsequently drive the economic climate we need to thrive, there has to be more than nice-ish roads.
If the recreation facilities could make a profit and pay for themselves, then we are all for that. But we know they don’t.
That means that some of our tax dollars have to be spent on those places, and so be it.
Sure many people in Westlock County don’t use Tawatinaw, but we have it, so we might as well make it work.
We should make all of our facilities work for us, in all facets, not just the base level of the bottom-line.
Remember that these facilities and amenities are finite — if we don’t have them, chances are we aren’t getting them and once they are gone, they aren’t coming back.
