Letters

Money “squandered” on Complex: reader

April 1, 2015   ·   0 Comments

(Re: In Good Company, Thursday, March 26)

Mayor Geoffrey Dawe should be ashamed of himself. He states openly that Aurora’s community “has just added 8,000 new residents” and then goes on to blandly assure Aurora’s citizens that the newly renovated Aurora Family Leisure Complex “looks fantastic . . . and improved.”
This unfathomable claim is so far from the truth it is absurd. Did the Mayor actually check out any other part of the facility besides the gym in which he played his “pick-up basketball game with members of Council?”
The women’s change room for starters is a disgrace. With 8,000 additional new residents in Aurora, why has the number of shower stalls gone from nine stalls in the old change room to a paltry three stalls in the new? The water pressure in the new showers is so low that a residue of chlorine still lingers when one is done, and no ledges have even been put on the shower walls to hold soap and shampoo.
There are even fewer toilets than before! The door to the handicapped toilet stall squeaks so badly that one is tempted to ponder how much labour it takes to oil the hinges of a new door. Two hair dryers are placed so high on the wall that any woman less than average height would find it difficult to reach the buttons to turn them on. No drain hole has been installed under the suit wringing device, and any water expelled below it puddles dangerously toward an impractical drain in the middle of the walk-through area at least six feet away!
The clothes lockers are very small, and many of the number plates on them are already discoloured. Unbelievably, the keys for the lockers fit indiscriminately into other lockers and consequently all the numbered keys do not match the numbered lockers, a bit of a joke for ensuring the safety of anyone’s valuables!
This smaller women’s change room from the pre-renovation design seems to have allowed space for an inexplicably very wide hallway in the complex on the west side. As I walked through this hallway headed toward the exit, I was confronted on my left with the sight of a group of hot tub bathers on the other side of the glass right beside my feet. Do people aiming to relax in the hot tub not deserve a little more privacy than that? Ditto for the women’s yoga and exercise areas near the front entrance. A large window of glass separates these spaces from all of the passers-by in the outer main hallway. Does it not make sense that a general modicum of privacy should have been considered in the design of these women’s facilities?
Who is responsible for the poor decisions that were made for the very inferior design of the new complex, and for the reckless spending of all of the millions of Aurora taxpayer dollars that were squandered in this Aurora Family Leisure Complex boondoggle?
I know of more than one town Councillor who has been contacted with major concerns about this renovation travesty, but who have not returned calls, and others who have expressed no knowledge about how key decisions for the plan of the renovation were reached. Is this surprising? When even the Mayor himself insists that the new AFLC is just dandy, why should his Councillors disagree?
Indeed, they may well be crossing their fingers in hopes that Aurora tax-payers daily lives soon leave them too busy for nothing but aimless grumbling at the sorry state of this pitiful excuse for a complex renovation.

Corey Elizabeth Jackson
Aurora

         

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