The St. Albert Sailfish Swim Club is diving into advocacy efforts to access an additional pool lane at Fountain Park.
The club’s board has stepped up efforts to convince the City of St. Albert to allow the use of an extra lane for the summer swim club, which operates between May and mid-August.
“Our No. 1 board priority is to advocate for additional lane space,” said Werner Biegler, the board president.
“For three years now the St. Albert Sailfish Swim Club has been trying to get additional lane space to support our increase in demands from swimmers,” Biegler said. “For three years now, we’ve been told no … and for three years now, we’ve had to turn away 20-30 (families).”
Currently the club gets four lanes and is hoping to get five. Biegler said they’d like to use the lane that’s currently kept open for public swim at all times.
As of earlier this week, the club’s waitlist is already at 46 swimmers before registration has even opened. Biegler worries the club is getting a reputation for elitism when it’s really just that membership has been capped at 90 swimmers each summer.
Biegler and other board members have approached the city to get more room. So far, they have solutions worked out for July and August and a proposal on the table for June, but the club also wants more room in May. Biegler is waiting on further response from the city after a meeting with the mayor and staff earlier this week.
“We remain optimistic that the city, in the spirit of compromise, would come back and find some solution to work for May, because if May doesn’t work, the rest of the season doesn’t work,” he said.
“All we’re seeking is 40 hours in May for a public lane … (that has) historically been underutilized,” Biegler said. “We don’t want a new pool built tomorrow, we just want 40 hours in May.”
Biegler said that 40 hours represents the only hurdle for the club to be able to bring on board as many as 15 to 20 new swimmers. He said his calculations show that same lane is available for more than 5,000 hours a year.
Biegler said it’s unfair for aquatics users to have to always have public time available compared to other recreation facilities such as arenas that do not.
“It’s an unfair practice for aquatics people, aquatics clubs have to bear this burden when the hockey world doesn’t,” he said.
Kelly McConnell, associate director of recreation facilities for the City of St. Albert, said keeping an open lane for public swimming has been in place for more than 10 years.
“Keeping a lane open, it really supports a philosophy of our spontaneous or drop-in recreation facilities or programs being available to the public,” McConnell said.
It’s a philosophy that extends to ice or gym users, he said. While there might not always be space on the ice kept available for spontaneous use, they do ensure public skate times at prime times, like Saturday afternoon, that teams and clubs would love to be able to access instead.
“We advocate for all users of the facility, so we have to keep that in mind,” McConnell said.
“I think the Sailfish is definitely a great group that we work with, like many of the groups we have in St. Albert,” McConnell said. The city was able to provide a number of viable options, even if they weren’t ideal, he said.
Use of the public lane in question is tracked, he said, and usually has about three people in it. He said swim clubs can get more people into a lane than would be normal for an uncontrolled public swim lane.
Mayor Nolan Crouse confirmed he was part of a meeting with some Sailfish board members and said it’s an example of what’s starting to happen with the city’s aquatics facilities, where there are also waitlists for many city swimming lessons and another swim club.
“This is just one more in a long line of pressures on the aquatics facilities,” Crouse said.
