Iqaluit city council mulls keeping or dropping pool lease with Nunastar

Iqaluit recreational director Amy Elgersma points to the cracks in Iqaluit’s municipal pool that will require extensive repairs to fix. (FILE PHOTO)

(Corrected, Nov. 29, 10:35 a.m.)

The City of Iqaluit continues to weigh its options with respect to the aging Astro Hill swimming pool, city councillors heard at their Nov. 27 meeting.

The city can decide to renew its lease for a three-year term with Nunastar Properties, which would last until 2016.

But it would also contain a provision allowing Nunastar to get out of the contract in mid-2014, should Nunastar decide they want the space for an expansion of their operations.

So Nunastar is also willing to guarantee 18 months of pool use, starting this Jan. 1, 2013. If they end the contract in 2014, Nunastar is offering to pay compensation, Hussey said.

Or the city could choose to just terminate that lease, John Hussey, Iqaluit’s chief administrative officer, said in a Nov. 27 update to council.

“The options there would be to give notice to terminate the lease of the pool, or else to work around the pool and still have the pool operating but just with restricted closures,” he said.

“The pool is, as everyone is aware, not been functional since the first week of Oct., [yet] we have been committed to paying Nunastar the monthly rent,” which is about $19,000.

A new lease would mean a three per cent annual increase in the price of admission of people to the pool, starting in 2014.

Right now, Nunastar gets $232,252.23 a year from the city in rent.

That would go up to 239,219.80 under a new lease agreement. Over the three year period, there would be a dollar increase of about $21,000, Hussey said.

But Coun. Romeyn Stevenson wanted to know where the city stands when it comes to the cost of repairs that the pool needs.

Those repairs have previously been pegged at about $160,000 by an engineering firm.

“That’s going to be discussed at a later point,” Hussey told him. “That’ll be follow-up information.”

“[But] I understand that they are very much linked in terms of the decision to proceed,” Stevenson said.

Coun. Joanasie Akumalik agreed with Stevenson.

“I was thinking that we were going to have all the information [available] to us and not just one item such as the renewal. I was hoping that we could get more information on the repairs,” he said, asking for clarification on the issue.

Even without the full information on the repair costs, Coun. Terry Dobbin welcomed the idea of a pool lease renewal.

“It’s still relatively good news for the citizens of Iqaluit because I know a lot of people are disappointed that the pool’s been closed for awhile,” Dobbin said.

Earlier in the meeting, Dobbin also said that ratepayers, who voted “yes” in the Oct. 15 on a $40-million new aquatics centre, still carry most of the costs of the City, while the other three-quarters of Iqaluit are getting a “free ride.”

At the meeting, councillors also heard from Peter Keenainak, chairman of the Nunavut Fisheries Training Consortium, who wrote a letter to the city about the pool, saying training consortium students need access to open water for safety training.

“This is absolutely essential for fishermen – without it, they cannot work in the fishing industry,” he said.

Without a pool, about 12 students and two instructors, with their equipment, could be forced travel to Ottawa for the training at a cost of about $50,000.

Usually, the consortium, which deals with marine and fishing industry training, brings people from around Nunavut to Iqaluit for the training, paying the city for use of the pool.

The letter calls for repairs to Iqaluit’s pool to be taken immediately “while the new aquatic centre is planned and built,” in time for their February 2013 safety training.