Fort Macleod sign. (Lethbridge News Now)

By David Opinko

Fort Macleod re-working plans for pool renovations after funding denied

Feb 11, 2020 | 1:38 PM

FORT MACLEOD, AB – The Town of Fort Macleod will have some sort of a renovated or expanded outdoor pool, but it is no longer clear what that might look like.

Originally, the town’s Chief Administrative Officer Sue Keenan explained that they were looking to expand the current pool to make it more of a “family destination”, incorporating features like a water slide, lazy river, three warm-up laps, and a leisure pool.

This was expected to cost approximately $4.2-million, although that was later reduced to around $3.5-million. Over half of this funding would have come from three years of previously-allocated Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) grants from the provincial government.

The municipality had also applied for a grant from the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program through the provincial and federal governments.

The province, however, informed them that “your project has not been selected to proceed to the federal application stage” as the program was “significantly oversubscribed” with more than 700 Expressions of Interest.

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After learning about this, the original motion brought forward to Fort Macleod council was to scrap the pool project altogether, but they voted instead to re-work it into something more affordable.

“We do want to go back for some public engagement because we had quite a bit of public engagement when we finalized this design to take forward,” says Keenan.

Just over $1.4-million of the MSI money will go towards other infrastructure projects.

Keenan told LNN that council did not want to lose out on a single year of revenue from the pool, so they will be looking to expedite the process of coming up with a new plan and to speak to the public in the near future.