City residents supported a bigger Servus Credit Union Place this week at an open house, but were split over how they wanted it to grow.
About 63 people attended an open house Wednesday to discuss plans for a proposed expansion to that facility.
Servus Place is filling up, according to facility director Diane Engler. It’s getting up to 100 people at once in its second floor fitness centre (which is meant to hold 60), and has about 650 people on waiting lists for its programs.
The expansion plan is meant to help Servus Place better meet the needs of current and future residents over the next 10 to 15 years. The plan proposes a number of changes and expansions to the centre, none of which are set in stone, Engler said.
“A big part of the expansion is our fitness centre,” she said, referring to a conceptual floor-plan.
According to the plan’s executive summary, the centre is popular but overcrowded, with its fitness programs spilling over into meeting rooms and field houses. The change rooms are also so undersized that many residents simply don’t use them.
“There’s a huge demand for larger fitness change rooms,” Engler said.
The plan proposes to relocate the change rooms to where the meeting rooms are now and to bump the meeting rooms down to the first floor. The change rooms will roughly quadruple in size to 5,145 square feet in total – from 1,250 – and will have eight shower stalls each instead of two.
The fitness centre will roughly double in size to create more open space for free weights and stretching, according to the plan. It will also expand out over the first floor leisure ice rink to add more studio space. Plans for the third floor include two more lanes on the running track and a new spin-cycle studio.
The plans also propose to replace the leisure ice rink with a youth gym, Engler said. Adults are crowding out the kids on the gym courts, she explained, and this rink is underused.
“We need to find more space for (children) to play,” she said.
That’s part of the reason for a proposed outdoor fitness area on the facility’s north side, one that could be a skating rink in the winter and a basketball court in the summer, Engler said. Residents have told the city that what they need is more indoor space, not outdoor, however, so this could become an enclosed area.
Staffers haven’t put a price tag on this expansion, Engler said, but it’s listed as a $15 million unfunded item on the city’s 10-year capital plan.
Paul Kane student Stephen Badry said he likes the idea of a youth gym.
“There’s a lot of big groups that come into the gym area,” he said, and it’s tough for little ones to play with the big kids.
He also supported adding more space to the leisure centre.
“It’s almost kind of awkward right now” to use it, he said, as there’s little space left due to all the benches. The locker rooms were “a little claustrophobic,” but he questioned whether they need a major expansion.
Former city councillor Neil Korotash said they definitely do.
“I don’t know if there’s been one day I’ve been here since the facility opened where there hasn’t been somebody complaining about the change rooms,” he said.
Korotash said he’d like to see the leisure ice and the front-entrance skylights stay, and that he wasn’t in favour of the north side fitness area.
“We’ve got lots of other outdoor facilities in the city,” he said, and enclosing it would be expensive.
Kate Barbieri said she’d be glad to see an expansion to the “teeny tiny” locker rooms, as well as the proposal to expand the fitness centre over top of the main entrance. She’d also like to see more retail space on the main floor.
“It just seems like such a big walkway,” she said.
The city wants residents to comment on the plans before Dec. 1. Council will get a report on the consultation in March.
Plans for the expansion are available at www.stalbert.ca/servusplaceplan.
