Jeff Burgar

It’s often said by politicians everywhere there is no such thing as a wasted dollar when it comes to spending taxpayer’s hard-earned dollars on recreation.
To paraphrase one local person, “You have a choice. Spend money on sports or spend money fixing busted windows, flat tires, vandalism, and trying to deal with just about every crime you can think of.”
Such blanket statements are very powerful. As taxpayers everywhere have seen, not only powerful, but persuasive and expensive.
Recreation as an operating expense [as opposed to paving streets and installing water lines] is one of the biggest costs in any municipality. Towns and cities don’t run hospitals. Smaller towns don’t pay the enormous costs of police. Those are paid by higher levels of government. For a small town or county, spending on recreation is close to the top.
Citizens don’t really care the details of how their water is made safe. They just expect it.
They don’t care where the sewage goes, as long as it isn’t backing up in their basement or on the street in front of their house.
They do get angry when potholes aren’t filled.
But as with water and sewer, rarely do citizens question money spent on recreation. They should.
If we are so gung-ho about fighting crime in the streets, why do so many recreation departments everywhere pretty well go on holidays during summer months? With school out, one would think this is prime time to latch onto young, impressionable minds. The devil does indeed make work for idle hands, right?
Now, it’s true that swimming pools and aquatic centres everywhere are booked all summer. Programs start early in the day and run into evening. Busy, busy, busy. But soccer pitches and ball diamonds, arenas and curling rinks? Not so much.
Before one argues this just proves the point that nobody spends enough money on summer programming, consider some points:
* The City of Grande Prairie has the largest slo-pitch league in northern Alberta and British Columbia. It’s organized by volunteers. Volunteers who did not take the summer off or who did not shut down because they had holidays someplace.
* Grande Prairie’s recreation department runs a string of well-attended summer camps combining sports and leadership, but no soccer programs. Not any form of indoor or outdoor ball programs. A person involved in GP recreation says there are not enough resources to keep running programs when few show up. But more importantly, they have tried to create interest with test programs. So far, the test programs have not created enough interest in anything except those summer camps.
What’s going on here?
To be concluded next week.