The Town of Innisfail will be entering a joint use agreement with Chinook's Edge School Division after council approved its $700,000 contribution to the project during the February 14 council meeting.
The town will now be partnering with Chinook's Edge School Division (CESD) the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools (RDRCS) and Red Deer County to build a three station gym in Innisfail.
The gym is part of a value management project in which the two school divisions developed an arrangement to better utilize the existing school sites for the benefit of all of the students and staff.
The original plans were for construction of a two station gym, which is about the size of two basketball courts, at the Innisfail Junior Senior High School (IHS) to plan for the needs of the students. But CESD approached the town and the county in June of 2010 to inquire if municipal officials would be interested in entering the partnership to add a third station to the gym.
Red Deer County council has committed to providing $300,000 as its portion of the project if it is to go forward.
The third station would add approximately an extra 300 square metres of space, or the size of an extra basketball court. The third station would allow the facility to be made available to the public after school hours.
From the time when council agreed to consider the project in the summer they have conducted public consultations to find out if the citizens would be interested in the larger gym and if they would be willing to pay for it.
An open house was held at IHS on January 17 during which the town introduced a public survey to gauge the interest of residents.
After reviewing the 186 completed surveys council decided to go ahead with the project and continue discussions with the school division.
Comments on the surveys came back mostly positive with people agreeing that the three station gym would be a great benefit to the community.
"This is something the town really needs. We need to keep out children busy here, instead of always running down the road to Red Deer," said one resident who responded to the survey.
"Innisfail needs to catch up to other towns and update its facilities," said another.
"I have been listening to people complain about the high school gym for years. Now we have the opportunity to now only have a new gym, but also to have a gym facility that is available for the whole community," said a survey respondent .
Survey participants gave their opinions on what kinds of addition they would like to see on the gym if it was to go forward. A running track was supported by many of those who filled out the survey but a fitness centre, bleachers, and a climbing wall were also suggested in the additional comments section of the survey.
Although many people were supportive of the project there were also a number who were strongly against the proposal.
One Innisfail senior said, "we citizens, I mean seniors should not be burdened with this. We paid our dues as our kids grew up and paid for it. The young people just want to have it all. Sorry I am against it."
"I went to this school in the 70s, we had a higher student population back then and we survived just fine and do not agree that we need this," said another respondent.
Some people said that they would support the project on certain terms such as it being available to residents during the day or if it was not paid for through taxes.
Just over 70 per cent of the people that completed the survey own property in Innisfail and almost half of the people who participated were between the ages of 41 and 55.
While almost 65 per cent of participants said they do not currently use the IHS gym almost 90 per cent said that they would use it if it were available to use after school hours.
The majority of people said they would use the facility for drop in sports and the second most popular response was that people would like to use it for special events.
Almost 45 per cent of participants agreed that they would support a $65 tax increase over three years to fund the project rather then a one-time tax increase of $195 per property.
The majority of participants however, did not support an annual recreation levy with almost 70 per cent of people who responded against it.
