On July 16, ground was officially broken on Niverville’s new Community Resource and Recreation Centre (CRRC). In April, council was pleased to announce over $11 million in funding for the CRRC from the federal and provincial governments. Along with Niverville council’s earlier commitment of $5 million, that funding was more than enough to kick the project off, leaving only $3 million of the almost $20-million-dollar budget left for local fundraising.
Ground-breaking day had been temporarily delayed as council awaited finalized design plans.
Local officials gathered at the site, including MP Ted Falk of Provencher, MLA Shannon Martin of Morris, Minister of Infrastructure Ron Schuler, Niverville Mayor Myron Dyck, as well as council members and town staff, representatives of the CRRC fundraising committee, and the management team of Von Ast Construction.
Dyck opened the event by acknowledging all levels of government as well as those on the ground floor who have invested themselves in seeing this project through to fruition. Among those are the Friends of Niverville, a committee dedicated to the planning of this project for the past few years.
“You need people who are community champions and invest in your community,” Dyck said. “Today we have both Libby Hanna with us as well as Clare Braun. [Thank you] to all of their committee.”
Special mention also went out to the Von Ast Construction team, the builder council has contracted for the project.
“They’ve shown themselves to be highly professional and to provide a quality of workmanship that I know this community can be very proud of,” he continued. “And we’re very excited that they will be the ones working on this.”
Ted Falk says he sees Niverville as one of the communities in his riding that is really going places.
“You’ve got a council and community groups here that are aggressive,” says Falk. “They want to look after their residents and provide facilities for them so that people are attracted here and they want to stay here so that their families can thrive and grow.”
Shannon Martin added that this new facility only reinforces the community’s motto, “Where you belong,” and he’s thrilled for the vibrant, active community that he’s had the pleasure of representing for the past six years.
The proposed 99,000-square-foot facility, once complete, will house a new arena, fieldhouse, and regulation-size ball courts. But it will also serve as an optimal gathering place with a two-storey indoor playground, meeting rooms, multipurpose rooms, a teaching kitchen, and rental space.
Unique to any other rural facility in Manitoba, the CRRC will connect to the new Niverville High School by way of a corridor leading to a registered childcare facility and the school’s performing arts space.
“This has been tried in a few other places in the city, but this is the first one that’s been tried outside of the city,” says Schuler. “You bring together two really important facets of a community: the school and the extracurricular activity. Too often those are separate, but schools need space for extracurricular and sometimes extracurricular needs stuff from the school, so this is a really healthy combination.”
Actively involved on the fundraising committee for the CRRC, Braun says times in Niverville have changed since the first arena was built here 52 years ago.
“I was 13 when we built [the current arena],” says Braun. “I watched the politics of this happen and there was a certain sadness to seeing it unfold because, as a community, we weren’t together.”
The original arena plan, he says, included a proposed dance hall on the same site but council and the community at large were highly divided on the issue.
In 1995, when Braun was elected mayor, he recalls a level of frustration with higher levels of government who wouldn’t provide funding to Niverville for even the most basic healthcare amenities. The solution, he and council decided, lay within the community itself and not from higher levels of government.
“If we’re going to be committed internally and stay unified in the process, there’ll be a time when governments will come to us and give us the things that we aspire to,” Braun says of council’s sentiments back in the day. “And that’s what really happened over here [with the CRRC].”
Since the funding announcement in April, Braun has been approached by leaders of other communities who are astounded at Niverville’s ability to make things happen without division in the ranks. He attributes that to learning from past mistakes, a forward-thinking council, a younger overall demographic of residents, and, generally, people who now listen to each other without dogmatism getting in the way of progress.
