A full calendar year has now passed since the Flin Flon Aqua Centre was shut down for good and while city council remains optimistic about grants for a replacement, nothing new has come down the pike.
City council received a letter from Manitoba Minister of Families Rochelle Squires as correspondence in their Feb. 16 meeting. The letter was a response to a letter sent out by city council in December to the families ministry, then led by Heather Stefanson. After a provincial cabinet shuffle bumped Stefanson to be Manitoba’s health minister, Squires took over the portfolio and answered back to the letter.
“Your letter raised the issue of a funding application for the Aqua Centre,” reads the Squires letter to council.
“We’ve been advised that this matter is with the Department of Finance.”
The centre closed its doors for the last time for what was first announced as a temporary shutdown Jan. 28, 2020. After an engineering assessment deemed the building no longer safe to use, the City announced the permanent closure of the Aqua Centre Feb. 14. The building had a partial roof collapse in November, followed not long after by the entire building being demolished and the site flattened.
The City of Flin Flon applied to the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (ICIP) in Sept. 2019, a federal grant that supplies around $180 billion to community projects and infrastructure throughout Canada. In the past, the City has received about $150,000 through the grant for a pair of projects - renovations to the Flin Flon Community Hall and the City’s bus garage.
However, despite applying for funding, no news has come to council on the funding front for a new pool.
Mayor Cal Huntley confirmed the lack of new news, though he addd that Manitoba municipal governments have pushed their provincial and federal counterparts for updates on projects requiring ICIP funding.
“No update whatsoever, but consistent with our other fellow municipalities, everybody’s really pushing to get the ICIP money released so they can let us know what’s been approved. We can get prepared for capital projects in the summer and different things like that,” said Huntley.
“Long story short, there’s no update.”
One recent conversation took place between a provincial grant official and City chief administrative officer Glenna Daschuk, providing a slight update on the project - that the province had confirmed with the City that the application was accurate.
“I had a conversation with the provincial office that is responsible for preparing them [applications] to the federal office today - she was calling to confirm that all of the information that they had on the application was accurate and had not changed,” said Daschuk.
