STEPHEN RICCIO
PONTIAC Jan. 22, 2021
The Shawville Arena closed for the season on Jan. 22, after a sporadic winter that was deprived of normalcy by the ongoing pandemic.
Shawville councillor Bill McCleary explained how the current COVID-19 restrictions had caused both minor hockey and figure skating to end its seasons, thereby making an open rink an even greater financial loss for the municipality.
“Since minor hockey decided that no matter what happens with the [government] announcement on Feb. 8, that they won’t be having a season, even if we were to go back into orange [zone] we can’t . . .
rent to anybody outside this MRC, so it just doesn’t make sense,” he said. “The only thing that would be able to use it really would be figure skating and several of their members are from the other MRC as well so they wouldn’t be allowed.”
McCleary said that the money loss will be significant, although it is tough to tell whether it would amount to the usual $60,000-$80,000 range of losses that the arena induces any other year.
“In a year like this where you can’t really recoup anything … it may not be worse because we’re not paying salaries obviously and we’re not paying hydro. [But] it costs a lot of money to run an arena,” he said. “A lot of places didn’t even put ice on this year because of the situation. We decided we would because we want something for our kids to do, but it’s just beating a dead horse to try and keep it on any longer.”
McCleary said that some groups managed to use the rink here and there while it was open.
“The men’s league was using it a couple of hours a week,” he said. “Individual parents were renting it on Saturdays, so Saturdays were pretty good because individual parents would book it and it was probably rented for six, seven hours a day.”
However, he said rink usage during the week was limited to several hours of figure skating and a couple hours of men’s league action, making the continued operation of the facility unfeasible.
The arena in Fort Coulonge meanwhile, the Centre de loisirs des Draveurs, has remained closed since March 2020 when it was forced to close during the first provincial lockdown, according to municipal councillor Nathalie Denault.
