GREENSTONE – Municipal councillors seemed receptive to deputations made for saving Beardmore Community Centre from closure, Rick Mikesh said Friday.
“I’m hopeful,” he told Newswatch. “We’ll try to work with them to try to get some solutions.”
Mikesh, a pastor in the Beardmore part of the sprawling municipality of Greenstone, was among a group of residents who made a deputation to Greenstone council last Tuesday night.
He said Friday it’s important that Beardmore’s popular curling rink, in particular, remain open for residents’ quality of life.
The Beardmore and Nakina community centres are both up for possible closure as Greenstone tries to cut expenditures.
A decision on whether to close the facilities has been deferred to mid-April, Mayor James McPherson said.
McPherson said the municipality is caught “between a rock and a hard place.”
Greenstone wishes it could keep all its facilities, he said, but legally can’t run deficits.
Greenstone council heard deputations Tuesday from two groups seeking preservation of the Beardmore complex and one group that hopes to see the Nakina complex spared from the chopping block.
Yvette Metansinine, chief of Animbiigoo Zaagi’igan Anishinaabek, spoke on behalf of her First Nation and two other First Nations near Beardmore.
The First Nations have “serious concerns about the potential reduction of accessibility, programming, staffing and possible closure of Beardmore complex,” Metansinine said.
The Beardmore facilities are used by First Nations residents throughout the year, she said.
Metansinine said the First Nations want to work with the municipality to keep the Beardmore complex open.
The deputation that included Mikesh said the Beardmore complex has been the community’s “life centre.”
The most important argument for keeping the complex open lies in Greenstone’s “stated commitment to accessibility and inclusivity for its taxpaying residents and their families,” they said.
Inclusion and accessibility also figured in the deputation for saving the Nakina Community Centre.
The Nakina deputation said travel time from Nakina to Geraldton, another Greenstone community, “is 46 minutes or more.”
Few Nakina residents are willing to travel that much to get to a curling rink or indoor arena, the deputation said, and “this does not align with the guiding principles of inclusion and accessibility.”
Paulette Abraham, who was in the Nakina deputation, said she came out of the council meeting feeling optimistic.
The meeting “open the lines of communication,” said Marla Michel, another Nakina resident. “So we’re hoping we’ll have more dialogue with (council).”
Abraham and Michel noted that Nakina’s curling club, which part of the Nakina community complex, has been in existence for 70 years.
Greenstone was created by the Ontario government in 2001 by combining Beardmore, Nakina, Geraldton, Longlac and some smaller communities along or near Highway 11.
