Rain and warm weather have prompted the closure of outdoor rinks in the city.
Despite the best efforts of staff the uncooperative weather won the battle.
Parks and Open Spaces Manager Cory Halvorsen says this year marks the earliest in his time with the city where the rinks have closed for the season.
“It is definitely earlier, and we’ve been walking the tight rope of ice conditions for most of the winter actually.”
Halvorsen notes some sites were looking good on Thursday however things turned very quickly by the weekend, noting as the winter winds down in addition to the temperature, the sun plays a big role in magnifying the impact on ice conditions.
However, there is still some time left for the rink down at Prince Arthur’s Landing, which has infrastructure geared towards allowing it to operate in warmer weather.
File Photo (Adam Riley / Acadia Broadcasting)
“We’re going to try to stretch that into the March Break,” says Halvorsen. “But we might experience day-by-day impacts there but we can recover in the mornings.”
The future of outdoor rinks in the city in general has been a topic broached by city council over the past, following the closure of eight rinks, leaving a total of 31 in operation this season, which city staff got operational at the beginning of the year.
Even with a shortened season Halvorsen says the rinks were popular.
“We did see a lot of people using them because, oddly, the nice temperatures, people were actually coming out to use them even though the temperatures were above seasonal.”
When it comes down to whether or not the city got its money’s worth for the season, Halvorsen believes it did.
“We had put a lot of work into these sites over the years, basically preparing them for challenging seasons like we’ve just had. We’ve done leveling at many sites, and then that combined with the slight reductions that was applied over the budget process.”
The full summary of numbers from counts performed by staff are not in yet but when the annual summary is presented, it will help give the city a better understanding of usage, despite fewer counts being able to be performed in February due to conditions.
