Residents lament indoor pool omission

Published on February 16, 2011

Elisabeth Faure

Why doesn’t Westmount’s new arena/pool project include an indoor pool? This question has been raised by several residents who point out that the new facility will offer year-round hockey — but no year-round swimming.

Topics :

NHL , Selwyn House , Melville Avenue , Québec ,Westmount

“A year-round pool would be wonderful for people,” says Melville Avenue resident Mavis Young.

“There was never a community poll asking, ‘What do you want?’” complains Peter Weldon of Academy Road. “Options were never put forward to the community.”

The existing pool, which will remain open for one more summer before being demolished next fall, will make way for a new, larger pool to be built as part of the City’s arena/pool project. An underground portion of the facility will boast two NHL-sized hockey rinks.

“We commissioned a number of reports, which are public, which indicate that the need for an indoor pool is not required today,” says Director General Duncan Campbell. “We may need one in the future, but currently, we don’t.”

A needs analysis study available on the City’s website (www.westmount.org) states: “Ville de Westmount is well equipped in terms of indoor aquatic activities within its territory compared with the averages observed in Québec.”

But some residents worry that public swimming is limited in Westmount because the only indoor pool in the community — at the Westmount Y Centre on Sherbrooke Street — offers less than two hours of public swim time per week. According to Y officials, the public has access to the Y pool only on Sundays from 2:45 to 4 p.m. Anyone looking to swim outside of this period must pay $17 for a day pass.

Campbell agrees there may be a need for an indoor pool down the road — but he says response to a mailer sent out by the City last April indicates that Westmounters are happy with the current proposal. “It was quite clear from the response that we got from the public ... this is what they’re willing to support,” Campbell says.

However, residents opposed to the arena project claim that the mailer results aren’t reliable, particularly because Selwyn House School sent out a mass email to parents and alumni asking them to respond favorably to the mailer. As recently reported by the Examiner, the City has approached Selwyn House to help fund the project.

“Once you have to have a second rink, because that way, for example, Selwyn House can have its own games, then you have to convince the community that you need a second rink,” says Andy Froncioni, author of the “Westmount Watch” blog (www.westmountwatch.com) “To do that, you have to make some consent.”

The mailer itself seems to contradict the needs analysis survey, stating that a user study showed that “we will probably need one (indoor pool) in the future, if not now.” The mailer says the cost of such a project, however, would be prohibitive.

Complicating matters is the project’s $20 million federal/provincial infrastructure grant. Secured by then-Mayor Karin Marks, the money was explicitly for a two-rink, outdoor-pool concept. “It’s been two rinks or nothing since that time,” says Weldon.

Campbell argues that changing the plan now could jeopardize the grant, although nothing in the grant agreement explicitly states this.

“When we changed from the (original) above-ground concept, we slightly modified the square footage of the concept,” says Campbell. “That little change alone ... took over six months for the government to re-approve. So I would think if you changed the whole concept around, it would take much longer.”

With the project set to go ahead over the next two years, it seems residents wanting an indoor pool may be out of luck.

“We’ll end up with two NHL-sized hockey rinks and no indoor pool,” says Young. “And we won’t have one for a long time to come, because the money will not be there.”