City residents should get first dibs on programs, Paulsen says
City council is set to decide Monday whether Saskatoon residents will have priority over non-residents when registering for local leisure centre programs, including swimming lessons.
Councillor Tiffany Paulsen said she intends to introduce a motion to create staggered registration times for leisure centre programs so Saskatoon residents can be first in line to sign up for the programs they subsidize through their property taxes.
“Each time there is a registration process, I receive an overwhelming number of complaints about people not being able to register their children in swimming lessons, and they are very frustrated about paying for these services and not being able to access them,” Paulsen said.
A city report scheduled to go before council Monday says it’s possible to modify the city’s automated registration system to differentiate between residents and non-residents and to create a staggered registration process. However, “considerable work” is needed to make the change in time for registration for fall 2014 programs, the report says.
Paulsen said she’s optimistic t hat , if her motion passes Monday night, the city will make the change by Aug. 17, when registration opens.
This spring, 21 per cent of children registered for swimming lessons in Saskatoon leisure centres were non-residents. In total, 829 non-residents were registered for swimming lessons, the majority at Harry Bailey Aquatic Centre or Lawson Civic Centre, where about a third of registrants were non-residents.
Warman Mayor Sheryl Spence said she understands why Paulsen wants to give Saskatoon taxpayers priority in leisure program registration, but she worries staggered registration could negatively affect rural children, including those in Warman, who don’t have a swimming pool in their own town.
“Having our residents accessing some of the programming that they can’t get out in our own community is a good thing for our residents, but it’s also a good thing for Saskatoon because there’s economic spinoff there,” the Warman mayor said.
Corman Park Reeve Judy Harwood described the proposed motion as “divisive.”
“We’re all talking about regional planning, working together, let’s all be ‘ kumbaya,’ so to do something like this you’re flying in the face of what we’re trying to do,” she said.
The report notes that enforcement of staggered registration could be “challenging” because of the potential for non-Saskatoon residents to submit Saskatoon addresses, but Paulsen
“HAVING OUR RESIDENTS ACCESSING SOME OF THE PROGRAMMING THAT THEY CAN’T GET OUT IN OUR OWN COMMUNITY IS A GOOD THING FOR OUR RESIDENTS, BUT IT’S ALSO A GOOD THING FOR SASKATOON.” WARMAN MAYOR SHERYL SPENCE
said she doesn’t anticipate this will be a significant problem.
“There are always people that will be dishonest, but the reality is that most of the people who are using programming right now are already registered in the system with their current addresses, so I suspect that we won’t see a lot of abuse,” she said.
Paulsen also previously raised the issue of charging higher admission rates for non-Saskatoon residents using Saskatoon leisure centres. The city report says it’s possible for existing admission systems to charge nonresidents different rates, but notes this can’t be set up by the fall.
The report also notes that leisure centres have seen a recent decline in admission and that this needs to be taken into account when the city thinks about increasing admission costs for certain groups.