The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Some very smart, very dedicated people were convinced that the proposed Flin Flon-Creighton CommunityPlex was a shoo-in for government funding. The project, many will recall, centred around a massive, multi-purpose recreational facility that was to be built adjacent to the Phantom Lake Golf Course sometime last decade. It never happened, of course. For all the bright-eyed optimism, not one penny for the project ever flowed in from Manitoba, Saskatchewan or Ottawa. In 2007, the City of Flin Flon Ð which had worked diligently with the Town of Creighton on the proposal Ð pronounced the CommunityPlex dead. Rather than dwell on past failures, a new committee, led by co-chairs Colleen McKee and Leslie Beck, has graciously stepped forward to once again examine the need for a new rec facility. The committee is making no assumptions about what citizens want. They do not presume to know that the public's top recreational priority is a new swimming pool, as others seem to have done in the past. Even that most basic question of whether the community wants a new facility is left open. The committee is leaving it up to a citizens' survey, due back by March 31, to answer such queries. The survey is a welcome tool, one that will put our civic leaders' fingers on the pulse of the populace in a way the CommunityPlex proposal never did. A key failing of the CommunityPlex bid was that by the time it reached the public survey stage, it was already well advanced. Residents were sent a booklet outlining the facility, and an accompanying survey asked them whether they supported what they saw. The vast majority of respondents did favour the concept. But even some of those individuals would have preferred to have had more input in the initial phases. Ideally, the survey would have been the very first step, just as it is now, these years later. It did not help that the CommunityPlex proposal called for Flin Flon's two curling clubs to amalgamate. While Willow Park curlers initially agreed to the merger, a re-vote produced the opposite result, in part because many feared the CommunityPlex would never be built Ð precisely what happened. The curling debacle was a bitter episode that divided friends and neighbours. As those behind this latest push for a rec facility move forward, they must do all in their power to avoid a repeat of this sort of incident. For now, however, the ball is in the public's court. It is imperative that everyone hand in their surveys by next Wednesday. If you don't have one, call City Hall or print one off from the city website. Your voice counts. Local Angle runs Fridays.
