Flagstaff County Council makes changes to recreation funding

Flagstaff County Council has passed a motion that will reduce funding available to facilities, and activities in facilities, not classified as regional in the 2015 and 2017 funding years.

Specifically, the motion was to discontinue capital funding to secondary facilities effective for the grant year of 2015 and to discontinue programming funding for secondary facilities effective for the grant year of 2017.

Recreation Coordinator for Flagstaff County, Jim Fedyk, says, “The resolution points us in the direction we want.

“There are stages to everything you do as you go; when the Recreation Master Plan was written, it identified priorities.

“Had those priorities been fully embraced by all, by this time, primary, or regional, facilities could have already met our goals.”

Fedyk says the county’s recreation goal is not to subsidize any facilities, the goal is to have excellent facilities offering excellent programs.

In 2012, Flagstaff’s Master plan identified secondary facilities as being low priority, he says, in 2015, they will have no priority.

“If these facilities are not in our long-term future, why do we still support them?”

Fedyk says financial figures over the last three years awakened Council’s knowledge on management costs versus users, and he says, “It came to our attention that it is well beyond our capacity to completely fund all existing facilities.

“Council has a limit to the budget, how much do you want to be put towards recreation?

“If we keep subsidizing under-used secondary facilities we have no money for new initiatives.

“Councillors are looking at Flagstaff as one community.

“We’re looking at this from a different perspective than everyone else.”

He says that a community’s reputation is not defined by whether or not they have a facility in the community.

Read more in the April 1 edition of The Community Press, on newsstands and via E-Subscription now.

Leslie Cholowsky,
Editor