The City of Rossland and Village of Warfield will look at a hybrid model of operating their community swimming pools next year.
The two municipalities collaborated on running their pools this year as a trial. Rossland recreation manager Kristi Calder presented a report to city council last week outlining what worked well and what could be improved. Council signed off on continuing the arrangement, but Warfield still needs to give its blessing.
Under the proposed changes, Rossland would provide start-up assistance with recruitment, hiring, and joint training, but once the pools are open, Warfield would look after its own facility and staff and take care of payroll internally.
Calder said overall things worked well this year, but there was a bit of confusion with overlapping areas.
“So we can remove that piece, but keep moving forward with joint training and recruitment and sharing of the staff that really allow us to use our economies of scale with two smaller communities to maximize the potential of what we can offer with our two outdoor pools,” she said.
Calder said joint recruitment makes a lot of sense, since the two communities are less than 10 minutes apart, and finding and training staff separately was inefficient. Joining forces lets them meet with potential employees and find out their wishes.
“Did they want to work a lot of hours and combine both pools to get those hours? Or are they wanting to keep their hours more minimal or work at only one pool?”
Combined training also allowed them to bring in specialists from outside the community to work with staff, Calder said.
She added it was exciting to see more regional collaboration.
“We’re all very small communities trying to capitalize on the budgets and staffing we have,” she said. “And it really was a pleasure to work with the Village of Warfield this year, both their staff and elected officials. It went pretty seamlessly.”
The Warfield pool is normally open from June to August each year, but in recent years the village has had a hard time finding enough staff, which led to this year’s trial arrangement with Rossland.
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