Over the next 10 to 30 years, politicians and county residents are going to have some tough decisions to make as community halls age, and the cost to renovate or replace them continues to rise, a consultant says.
“The issue is a lot of those halls were either built by farmers or community members or they were built at a time when the building code was different,” Mike Roma of Edmonton-based RC Strategies says.
He says most such halls are at least 40 years old and some are 80 or 90 years old.
“A lot of the community halls are definitely getting to the end of their useful life cycle or they're going to require major investment to be sustained, and I don't see where the investment's going to come from,” Roma says.
“I can guarantee you that there's no way that all of the community hall infrastructure that exists in the province right now is going to be sustained for the long run. There are going to be some that shut down.”
For one thing, Roma says, the Alberta economy has been so hot that there's been a strong demand for tradespeople. That in turn has driven up the price for construction to the point where people who operate some community halls likely won't be able to afford to renovate them or keep them running.
Another factor, he says, is the rules for building new halls or renovating existing ones have changed over the decades.
“They thought blueprints were just a formality to get a grant kind of thing. And you could do that back then, because you knew how to do that and there was nobody necessarily there to say you couldn't,” he says.
“But I think now, because of liability and because of municipal involvement and conditions on grants and all kinds of stuff, there are more stringent sort of requirements that you have to adhere to.
“You can't have people on a worksite who don't have a hard hat on and aren't certified in certain things. Whereas if it was a group of farmers or community members building a facility, nobody was there to tell them that they needed a hard hat or steel-toed boots or they needed to be a journeyman in that area. They just did it, right? Because of our society right now, that's not going to happen.”
It's a tough decision for people who run those halls, he says.
“They're up against this wall where they can't afford to replace (them). They don't want to lose their facility, because it means they'll lose a part of their community or their ability to break bread together and that kind of thing,” he says.
Some volunteers have been able to keep their halls going pretty well, he says. Others are finding it harder and harder to make revenues meet expenses.
“That's evolved into really them sitting around the table trying to figure out how to get more rentals so they can keep the lights on and what kind of toilet paper to get,” he says. “Their volunteer hours are spent making those kind of operational decisions, where they'd be better off being spent doing programming and bringing people together.”
