Two local senior hockey organizations have asked the Town of Bancroft to reconsider user fees at the North Hastings Community Centre, or they may lace up the skates elsewhere.
Brian Suter of KO Masters Hockey and David Machum of JB Hockey said their exit would be due to the town increasing user fees at the facility to $400 for this season.
Suter and Machum said that even before adding the $400 user fee, the daytime rental rate for the community centre is already higher than many other facilities in the area.
Suter estimated that each individual player would save about $650 over the course of the season if they played in Apsley or Wilberforce.
He added that the town would miss out on other revenue if the teams moved elsewhere.
“When they’re in Bancroft, they usually spend money on fuel and personal services and groceries and so on, and [we] figured that the average person spends – it would be a conservative amount – of about $40 per visit,” he said.
“Well that adds up over the course of the season, and it would equal more than $55,000 for each of the teams, so that’s over $100,000 of local spending.”
Town of Bancroft General Manager Andra Kauffeldt confirmed that the $400 fee is set in stone.
Everyone would pay the one-time fee at the start of the hockey season, and users from within the town would have it rebated while users from outside would not.
Kauffeldt noted that the Town is also looking at increasing fees again to $600 for next season.
She said only about 30 per cent of the facility’s users are from within Bancroft’s town limits, but Bancroft taxpayers shoulder 100 per cent of the financial burden to run the facility.
“It’s important to note that the Town does not want to close the arena, that we don’t want to have these user fees, that we have been trying to get our surrounding municipalities to work with us in various different forms since we took over the arena in 2022,” she said.
“This isn’t how any of us want this to go, but we can’t expect our ratepayers to shoulder 100 per cent of the recreational expenses.”
Kauffeldt added that if teams walk away from the use of the facility, then the cost to operate would decrease anyway.
She said she thinks people from the area will still come to Bancroft for things like fuel and groceries, whether they are coming to play hockey or not.
