OLDS — Town council needs to talk about regulating outdoor hockey rinks, Coun. Mary Anne Overwater says.
Overwater raised that idea on March 8.
Overwater expanded on that idea during an interview, stressing her concern is with backyard rinks, not public ones.
“I just sort of thought that we should have a discussion on that with the Community Standards Bylaw because sometimes, the backyard hockey rinks, they can become a concern for the neighbours, listening to pucks shooting, banging against the boards at all kinds of hours,” Overwater said.
She said that discussion could include regulating various aspects of the rinks such as the height of the boards “because then of course that would then will take away from the huge slap shots that happen."
“Let’s face it; slapshots, I mean, you never know where the hell they’re going,” she added with a light laugh. “A good wrist shot, to me, always worked better than a good slap shot.”
Potential damage to fences is also a concern.
Overwater said another suggestion would be to regulate the hours that kids and/or adults could be out on those rinks.
“You know yourself if you’re sitting there and you’re trying to enjoy your property and if you’ve got huge slap shots going close to your fence, that constant bang, bang, bang, bang, I mean, kids can really shoot those hard and when you’re sitting inside your house, you can still hear it,” she said. Overwater stressed she has nothing against backyard rinks per se.
“I think it’s good, kids outside you know, getting exercise and whatever,” she said. “But I don’t think it should be to the detriment of people that are the next door neighbours. So I think council should really have a good discussion about it.”Overwater agreed that COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns this year have probably heightened concern about the rinks.
“It probably has. There’s probably a few more people who have put in backyard rinks,” she said.
“Like I said, I’m not against them. I just think, you know, we have to be cognizant of our neighbours as to their quality of life as well.”
When Overwater brought up the concerns about backyard rinks, chief administrative officer Michael Merritt said that is one issue town officials want to address in the Community Standards Bylaw. Another is graffiti.
However, he said the goal was to deal with the raising of urban chickens before getting to those other issues because council undertook “a very critical engagement” with the community on that issue.“So to introduce a number of other things, we thought it would be better to wait until May of this year or some time before the summer break,” Merritt said.
“We always intended to bring the Community Standards Bylaw back after we dealt with it this year."
Mayor Mike Muzychka suggested the outdoor rink issue might be rather moot at this time of the year anyway.
“Most of our outdoor rinks have turned into splash parks with the nice weather we’ve been having," he said. “We’ve got some time before we need to address it for next fall.”
