MAPLETON – While a growing Mennonite youth hockey league has received approval for its seasonal outdoor skating rink, they’ve already started thinking about additional uses for the space.
As discussed during a council meeting Tuesday evening, while the 200-foot by 85-foot outdoor rink's temporary re-zoning was approved earlier this year, the new report allows the facility to operate permanently in a seasonal capacity.
However, the applicant, Mervin Weber, delegated during the meeting to ask council to consider allowing them to expand the change room size for additional storage and farm shop use during the summer.
“It comes down to the money we're spending,” said Weber. “We were just thinking that if we're going to put up permanent walls anyway, how can we stretch it.”
Mayor Gregg Davidson proposed that the group consider using the outdoor rink for ball hockey during the summer, to ensure the change room's use.
Weber estimates that the change rooms would support around 10 games a year between two teams, with 30 hours of use on an annual basis, and feels that the space would be better used as a shed.
"The summers are for work and the winter is for playing hockey," said Weber. "So it'll be roughly 100 grand sitting there unused all summer."
“We felt that 1,100 square feet was adequate for two teams of hockey players. I mean, that's bigger than (the Mapleton council chambers),” said Linda Redmond, city planner, during the meeting. “Given what the intent behind the application was, we felt that was an adequate size space to keep this use small in scale.”
The current report allows the proposed change rooms as long as they don’t exceed 102 square metres.
Redmond also clarified that while the change rooms are allowed to be used as a shop area during the off-season, they cannot be used to store farm equipment according to current zoning.
Coun. Michael Martin agreed that he didn’t feel that there’s a good reason to go bigger outside of flexibility moving forward.
“Where we come from, a lot of times when there's too much flexibility, it ends up biting us in the butt down the road,” said Martin. “We're not trying to say you're going to possibly introduce other types of uses that it's not really intended for…but I need a good rationale to extend it.”
Located at 7937 Wellington Rd 8, the entire property is approximately 143 acres in size and occupied by a farm operation and residence.
Only for the local Mennonite hockey league, general public commercial purposes as well as road signage and advertising are not permitted.
Isabel Buckmaster is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.
