Arenas and splash parks

Contratulations to Pinawa Manitoba for winning the Kraft Celebration Tour show down with Steinbach for $25,000 to redevelop the local arena. Pinawa is a remarkable little deer-infested town that has produced doctors, musicians, a successful author, an MMA fighter, and two of your favourite bloggers, but alas ... no NHL stars. Perhaps a star will be crafted in the renewed Orville Acres Arena?

So while the people of Pinawa rallied together, campaigned, and prostituted themselves out for crucial votes to keep their arena functional; the village of Lorette was just handed $350,000 for a splash park.

I have nothing against Lorette. I have personal connections to that town, but it is a town of only 600-2000 people (depending on where you look). I can't find the census data for the town, but based on the data for the municipality, that works out to about 400 or so kids. That's a lot of money per kid -- for something that will only be used on nice days for about three months a year. What ever happened to setting up a sprinkler in the front yard? You could buy 400 sprinklers for $4,000 at Canadian Tire!

I'm all for spending on recreation -- it's important to keep families active and to give kids something to do besides drinking in the bush and learning how to steal cars. It will benefit us all in the long run. But I'm not for randomly spending huge chunks of cash (unless that cash is benefiting me personally).

Why Lorette? Why a splash park? Why not, say, a basketball court in Melita or an indoor soccer pitch in Dauphin? I don't understand ...

The province has a whole pool of this money: $16.5 million dollars deep. I would like to believe that they will spend it wisely and with careful consideration of the benefits, versus the apparent process of throwing a dart at a map of the province, followed by a roulette wheel with different kinds of recreational equipment. (Flin Flon needs vibrators? Ok ... make it so Number One.)

Somebody out there knows how these things are determined. Speak up, man.