More up to date facility usage statistics have been requested by members of the City of Grande Prairie’s Public and Protective Services Committee as they look to fine tune the recently completed long term recreation strategy.
Councillor Dylan Bressey says while the report has laid out steps as how the municipality intends to roll out potential changes to its recreation strategy, a little more work needed to be done. Specifically more recent utilization numbers, with current stats dating back to the 2016 census.
“An important part of councils work is to measure progress in our organization, and it’s hard to do that if you don’t know your baseline,” he says.
“I think the intention on asking for current utilization rates is so we can know if we are doing a good, bad job or great job in increasing those rates in the future.”
Among the overarching pillars of the strategy, which include community capacity, and creating what the city calls equitable opportunities, administration is also looking the need for investment where applicable. Bressey says the recent public consultation portion of the strategy will give them a good base to jump from as to what is needed, and where.
“We had a large amount of user groups and individual residents talking to administration and helping shape this plan. I really think it’s a document the community has had a strong voice in, and that will be useful for council to guide our future decisions because of that.”
Once the updated data is collected, it’s expected the recreation strategy will return to the committee level for further discussion, before council votes on the document as a whole.