The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Flin Flonners will face recreational facility closures, user fee hikes or higher property taxes if the proposed Communityplex isn't built. That's the grim assessment from Mayor Dennis Ballard, who updated the public yesterday on the potential facility that would combine recreational and community services under one roof. "It's not so much what it will cost to do this, it's what it will cost if we don't," he said in an address to the 20 people attending the Healthy Flin Flon forum at the Friendship Centre. "I feel we don't have any choice here. This is an option that's come up where we can actually make it happen." The realization of the Communityplex most likely depends on significant funding from the higher levels of government, and Ballard said he won't know until Christmastime whether that money will be approved. The mayor conceded that the City made a mistake by not releasing more information on the project, something he said will be corrected with an upcoming "community awareness package." "Our theory was, we don't want to get out there in the public and be making a bunch of announcements when we don't know and we still really don't know [the project's future]," he said. "Finally I realized at some point that when you don't give people any information, they start to make up their own, and I start to hear a lot of negative comments out there about this Communityplex." Ballard said the new information will show that without the Communityplex, the closure of facilities, higher fees or more taxes are the City's only options. "When you raise fees, people don't go," he said. "When you raise taxes, the snipers come out. And closing down facilities, I don't want to talk about it; it's not going to happen."
