Mayor to students: skating rink planned

SMITH.

BRACEBRIDGE - With tomorrow’s voters hot on their heels, Bracebridge councillors are moving ahead with plans to place an outdoor skating rink at Annie Williams Park.
The decision was made during a general committee meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 23, after red tape resulted in a year’s worth of delays in getting the idea off the ground. Council’s move came shortly before Mayor Graydon Smith revealed that the ice rink was the biggest hot button issue for youngsters at Monck Public School during a visit the week prior.
“When I did my local government presentation, it was the most asked question I got. It was ‘when are you going to have the outdoor rink?’” said Smith. “We need to alert our younger constituents that good news is on the way.”
The lengthy discussion over the rink was the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of grassroots efforts to give residents a new place to skate. Original plans last winter called for the rink to be built on a patch of land next to the Your Independent Grocer with volunteer muscle and funds raised from the community.
But the project has remained on thin since, with liability concerns emanating from parent company Loblaw. On top of its own fears about liability, the town also feared the grocery store location would not be adequately supported by infrastructure, including enough parking or washrooms.
Town staff explored a number of other possible areas to place the rink. Memorial Park, staff found, did have enough parking, but did not have enough clear space to house a rink. Though St. Dominic Catholic Secondary School was open to the idea of housing a rink in an unused parking lot, that proposal was nixed after discussions with the Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board.
Coun. Lori-Lynn Giaschi-Pacini initially expressed some concerns at Tuesday’s meeting over whether donors who pledged their support would still be on-board if the situation continues to change.
“There’s many reasons why things can’t happen or don’t happen, then the taxpayer is stuck with the overcost,” she said.
However, she later reneged on those concerns and put her support behind the proposal after culture and recreation director Leo Broere informed council that staff had taken steps to confirm the commitment of donors beforehand.
Coun. Mark Quemby also cautioned that forcing commitments from volunteers and donors could actually end up harming the cause.
“A lot of these organizations are waiting for us to actually pick a location and say we’re actually going to do it before anything gets donated,” he said.
Coun. Scott Young encouraged his fellow councillors to just get the ball rolling.
“At this point I think it would behoove us all to just get behind this Annie Williams Park project, it’s the recommendation we have ahead of us. It’s lined up. It’s teed up. It’s ready to go. There’s goodwill. There’s community support. There are volunteers galore,” he said. “I think that at this point we’ve been through the ringer so many times now that we’re going to start losing goodwill if we continue to pound this issue.”

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