New pool planned for Azilda could see other Greater Sudbury pools close

The push for a new multi-million dollar swimming pool in one corner of Greater Sudbury, could have ripple affects for other parts of the city.

If the proposed therapeutic and leisure pool goes ahead in Azilda, the city will consider closing some of its existing pools.

Sudbury city council will receive a report June 3 detailing how the $4.7 million pool planned for the Lionel Lalonde Centre in Azilda could affect the city's budget and the five pools it currently operates.

Director of Leisure Services Jeff Pafford says if the Azilda pool opens as planned in 2021, no other pools would close immediately.

"We would run all pools, six at that time for a one year period and then we would come back to council for conversations about supply and number of pools," he says.

But Pafford says most of the city pools are reaching the end of their "life expectancy" with most built in the 1960s and 1970s.

Operating those five pools, including the Onaping and Howard Armstrong community centres, costs Sudbury taxpayers about $3.2 million a year. The Azilda pool would add another $500,000.

A 2017 staff report estimated the pools needed $3.1 million in repairs in the next five years, $981,000 of that for the 50-year-old Onaping pool, which sees the lowest number of visitors at around 8,000 every year.

Gerry Montpellier is the city councillor for the Onaping area, and his Chelmsford constituents would definitely benefit from having a pool next door in Azilda.

But he says the pools are a public service and shouldn't close.

"So you're either in the business of losing money for recreation or you're not. Because if there's a pool 20 miles down the road that's going to lose money as well, you rip off one community that somebody else can lose just as much money or more," says Montpellier.

"The facilities have to be everywhere."

The last time swimming pools were a hot political topic in Greater Sudbury was in the early days of amalgamation, when Copper Cliff's Dow Pool was closed in 2003.

After a year of lobbying from a community group called the Dow Pool Lifesavers it was re-opened.

Brenda Lizzi organized the group's first meeting and still goes to the pool every day for treatment for lupus.

She is ready to restart the same fight from 15 years ago if the city looks to close her pool again.

"The money that they have to build this therapeutic pool, why don't they use that money to fix the ones that they have?" Lizzi says.

"We're going to try to fight to keep this pool open. I can't see it close."

Mimi Regimbal was also part of the lifesavers group 15 years ago and says she hears Sudburians coveting the big multi-purpose recreation complexes in cities in southern Ontario, but she argues Copper Cliff has that with a pool, arena, curling club and parks all in walking distance.

"We have a multi-use facility, it's under one roof it's called the sky and it works," she says.

"Nobody wants to lose their arena, nobody wants to lose their pool. Everybody wants what they have."

The cost of building and operating multi-million swimming pools was a hot topic across the northeast during the 2018 municipal election, with Kapuskasing, Timmins, Kirkland Lake and Elliot Lake all debating new aquatic centres in recent years.

There was a similar debate in Cochrane, before the $12 million Tim Horton Event Centre opened with its pool and arena in 2006.

"I think there was those concerns at the beginning," says Director of Community Services Jason Boyer, addingthe pool costs about $350,000 to operate, minus the $115,000 the town brings in with user fees.

"I truly believe the community sees the value and the impact the facility has to justify the cost."

North Bay is the only city in the northeast to not own its own pool, but it has partnered with the YMCA for decades.

Mayor Al McDonald says city taxpayers cover the annual operating costs for the building to the tune of $350,000, much less than running the entire pool.

"They're very expensive to run," he says.