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Rec centre shuts down Fort Smith facility undergoes maintenance work for five days
Paul Bickford
Northern News Services
Published Monday, August 26, 2013
THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
The Fort Smith Recreation and Community Centre will be closed to the public for five days this week from Aug. 26 to 30.
It is the longest time the entire facility has been shut down.
Town council voted unanimously in favour of the shutdown at its meeting on Aug. 27.
The five-day closure is related to maintenance on the swimming pool and the gymnasium.
The pool is to close for annual maintenance from Aug. 26 to Sept. 13, while the gymnasium closed on Aug. 20 for floor refinishing and will reopen on Sept. 3.
Fort Smith Mayor Brad Brake said the town decided the shutdown would be a good opportunity to do some maintenance on the facility as a whole and train its employees. He said the work will include such things as cleaning and inventory.
"With the pool shut down and the gymnasium shut down, there's not a whole lot of anything that's going to be going on," he said, adding the town consulted with user groups before deciding on the total closure.
One user group is the Fort Smith Seniors' Society, which has a room in the centre.
"It affected us a little bit, but not seriously," society president Leon Peterson said of the closure.
The rec centre offers a lot of recreation opportunities besides the pool and gymnasium. For instance, there are also a weightlifting room and a squash court.
Brake said this is the first time the rec centre will be closed for such an extended period of time, and he's interested to see how the shutdown works, adding it may become an annual occurrence if it works well this year.
"It might be quite good because we can shut down for the full week and get a lot of attention paid to the work that needs to be done."
Brake said people who have passes to use the centre will not lose anything, since their passes will be extended by a week.
While the total shutdown is for a week, the pool shutdown will be for two to three weeks.
The pool maintenance will involve emptying the pool and examining it to see if any repairs are required. The gymnasium floor refinishing will take two weeks.
Brake said one small area of the floor will be replaced after a light caught fire earlier this summer and plastic dripped onto the wooden floor.
The rec centre opened in 1996 and the pool was added to the facility in 2004.
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