Following a special Town of Golden council meeting at the end of May, the Columbia Shuswap Regional District has a few things on its plate to bring to rural residents.
It is not necessarily new information that the CSRD will work on contributing 20 per cent of aggregate operating costs of four core facilities, since a committee has been working on the agreement logistics for 18 months already.
But, that initiative will go to referendum in the fall, and rural residents will have the chance to provide their say in the matter.
“The shared services, it wasn’t an easy process, but it was an important process,” said Area A director Karen Cathcart.
The Town of Golden and the CSRD have been working together to provide as much information as possible to residents about the four facilities, which include the Golden Swimming Pool, the Mount 7 Rec Plex, the Golden Seniors’ Centre, and the Golden Civic Centre.
According to information from the Town of Golden, there are metrics in place to determine how many municipal and rural residents use each of the facilities.
At the pool, staff ask each user where they are from when they pay the user fee, and around 25 per cent of those users come from Area A, explains Cathcart. At the Rec Plex, volunteers and activity hosts provide the information.
The Seniors’ Centre users are made up of society members, which provides information about users.
And, the Golden Civic Centre information is collected from Kicking Horse Culture, which has a large membership group and hosts a majority of the regular events at the facility.
Many of the Kicking Horse Culture members come from Area A, Town CAO Jon Wilsgard said.
“Taking all that into consideration and then looking at the numbers and wanting hopefully that the referendum would succeed, that’s how we came up with the 20 per cent,” Cathcart said.
In addition to the 20 per cent for the four facilities indicated in the Town’s proposal, the CSRD and Cathcart offered 40 per cent of the 10 year capital expenditures be covered through the Gas Tax Fund, which amounts to $315,000 over the next 10 years, and does not come from resident’s taxes.
“That’s a good use of Gas Tax money. Gas Tax is for updating more efficient facilities and things like that,” Cathcart said, adding that Gas Tax eligibilities include facility efficiencies.
The Town of Golden and the CSRD have a number of service agreements in place already.
According to Wilsgard, the cemetery, the airport, the emergency management program, mosquito control, and the arena are all paid for by both rural and municipal residents.
“Arenas and generally swimming pools are seen as regional facilities. Everyone uses them. You need the power of a greater taxation pool to support them because they are very expensive facilities,” Wilsgard said. “They take a lot of money to build, to pay off, and to run. That is by far the common place, that these sorts of facilities are supported by the two different jurisdictions of government.”
In addition to the referendum the CSRD will hold in October, the board is also moving forward with a feasibility study on building a year round aquatic facility.
At the May 23 special council meeting, the CSRD requested the Town’s concurrence, and town council conceded that the CSRD had the authority to move forward without its concurrence.
The motion from the CSRD is to secure the funds to do the feasibility study, and now it will be brought back to the June CSRD board table to ensure everything is good to go before the process begins.
Cathcart said the process is lengthy, and will take a while before there is an engagement protocol for residents, and it will probably follow through the elections in October as well.
“At the end of the day, it will provide really good knowledge and research data for residents to make a decision on whether or not they want to move this forward, and that’s critical, because there will be taxation on it,” Cathcart said.
The regional district conducts feasibility studies like these, and one was done years ago for the feasibility of an indoor aquatic centre, which lost by “minimal votes,” Cathcart said.
“It was important to me as a director because residents asked for this,” she added. “At the end of the day, the data and the knowledge goes back to the residents, and we say ‘here’s what you asked for, here’s what it looks like as an operational cost, here’s what it looks like on your taxes bottom line, now make a decision. Do you want this service? Do you want this facility? And you go from there.'”
