City entering final stages of recreation reopening

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The Leduc Recreation Centre (LRC) aquatics centre and Sobeys Arena are two of the last amenities set to reopen as part of the city’s phased approach.

Recreation facilities included in Stage 2 of the provincial relaunch strategy began opening last month in Leduc with the Spray Park on June 24 and the William F. Lede baseball diamonds on June 29. Since then the city has reopened parts of the LRC, athletic fields and the Alexandra Outdoor Pool.

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Darrell Melvie, general manager of community and protective services, said the experience is quite a bit different than what residents might be used to but reopening has been successful so far.

“There’s pre-screening that we have in our facilities, not dissimilar to screening you’d see in other venues. There are occupancy limits, so as an example, in our arenas we can only have 50 people in a single arena including participants and coaches,” Melvie said.

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“To put it in perspective at the outdoor pool our maximum at any one time is 70 people based on physical distancing, whereas normally it would’ve been 240 so it’s just a new reality.”

Along with increased cleaning and physical distancing measures the city has introduced a way to pre-book when using the fitness centres or recently reopened field houses.

“You guarantee your spot by scheduling on the [Live Leduc] app, you can just show up but there’s no guarantee that you can get in. That said at this time of year the fitness centre and track at the LRC is usually not quite as busy as it would be in fall or winter so it’s actually a good time for us to open with these new guidelines because it’s not as busy as it normally would be.”

He added that with a recent increase in active cases in Alberta they’re continuing to follow updates from Alberta Health Services (AHS).

“We have plans in place if one of our staff in an amenity was to get COVID-19 but overall we would defer back to the chief medical officer and AHS,” Melvie said.

“If the PMO came out and said, close facilities again based on the statistics, we would respond to that so we’re watching it.”

Despite the differences in user experience and some of the challenges, Melvie said they’ve had a good response from residents so far.

“The community has been really good, people are understanding about the situation. A lot of it comes down to our own behaviours and physical distancing. We can create rules and AHS can create a lot of rules but at the end of the day it’s up to us as users to respect physical distancing.”