At City of Powell River Committee of the Whole on Tuesday, February 5, the city’s manager of recreation, Neil Pukesh, reported on the outcomes of the $34,500 BC Healthy Communities Society active communities grant it received to promote recreation activities in Powell River.
“We're making an effort to get more people active and people are becoming more active,” said Pukesh. The goal is for Powell River to be one of the most active and healthy communities in BC.
One of the tools purchased through the grant was three monitors to measure activity levels on Powell River’s parks and trails system. A permanent monitor is at the sea walk and two portable ones are at the Millenium Park entrance by the complex and one at Willingdon Beach park trail.
“These things, on a daily basis, show our traffic counts, up to the hour and to the minute. It even shows trends,” said Pukesh.
The monitors also transmit weather statistics on trail use. There were low count numbers on January 1 because it was raining, the winds were up and temperatures were low, according to statistics collected from the monitors.
Pukesh said, the busiest time on the sea walk is 2 pm with 350 people per hour walking along the waterfront. In January, the peak was Sunday, January 13, when the weather was sunny, the temperature was up, rainfall was down and the winds were low.
Another tool to promote an active community and a resource for tourism, is 5,000 business-card sized fold-out maps that were created, highlighting Powell River’s parks and trails system.
“I was once a newcomer to this community and I had no idea where trails were,” said Pukesh. “There was Penticton and Millennium Park but there's no real signage. This is going to expose these trails and maps to visitors and to our community residents.”
The maps are available at city hall, Powell River Recreation Complex and Willingdon Beach campground.
The recreation complex is the hub of an active and healthy Powell River and Pukesh said programs have grown since 2015 by 25 per cent.
“We're now getting 377 people on average per day coming up to our registration desk making a transaction through membership or paying to attend a drop-in program,” said Pukesh.
He added that 40 per cent of membership scans are seniors, 60 years old and above, 36 per cent are adult memberships and as of January 31, 2,453 people have active memberships, which is nearly 20 per cent of Powell River’s population.
“Between 9 am and noon is one of the busiest times for membership scans. You can't even find a parking spot at 10 am Monday through Friday and that's a good problem to have,” said Pukesh, but he added the increase in the number of people using the programs is putting a strain on the complex.
