Opening date clearer as new Active Living Centre set for testing

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That stage will also see the ALC outfitted with furniture, furnishings, fixtures and equipment.

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Staff and lifeguard training will then begin November 1, and will need to be completed before it can be opened to the public.

“We can’t start training staff until substantial completion, because it’s technically still a construction site and we can’t really get in here and do what we need to do,” Matt Faucher, Acting Director of Recreation Services for the City of Vernon, said during the tour.

“We had originally planned for a six-week period that we’d be setting everything up, training the staff, and then running tests with user groups. It’s all fine and dandy to be looking at it on paper, it’s a whole other ball game when there’s 750 people in the pool area, that’s what we’re allowed for occupancy. That looks completely different.

“So we’re going to need some time with our staff and we’ve connected with the school district and other user groups to start bringing people in during that period so we can make sure that all our operating procedures have been running safely and effectively and that we didn’t miss anything. Subsequent to that is when we would open to the public.”

Doug Ross, the ALC Project Manager, compared the opening of the ALC to the launch of a new restaurant.

“You bring in family friends, and you try it out on them and you practice serving, it will be the same kind of thing with this,” Ross explained.

“We’ll bring in the school district kids, the Kokanee Swim Club, that kind of thing, do a ‘public swim’ from that group to let the lifeguards try it out, let the clerks see how it feels to have people in the building. It’ll be a soft opening.”

Opening of the pool to the general public was not set as of time of publication, but Faucher said those detailed timelines would be known closer to when the facility meets that substantially complete designation.

Ground was broken for the ALC in April of 2024, and city communications have always framed the opening as “Fall of 2026,” and Ross said that was still a possibility and a big win for a project this size due to using the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) model applied to this facility.

“I think [back at the start of the project] some people said it was going to take 48 months, because of the scale of the project, and Dustin and his team have been able to do it in 37,” Ross stated. 

“We were able to do that because of the IPD model overlapping the design phase with the construction phase. We started construction in April of 2024 because we knew what size the building would be, we knew how deep the pools were going to be, so we started with all that foundational work while the team was still designing some of the other features that were going to be included in the facility, and that ended up saving time.

“So my answer, it’s a long one, answer, but it is that this facility has been delivered probably 10 to 11 months sooner than what would be done under a normal model, and I will remind you that the first day of winter is December 21.”

The city was planning to start selling memberships November 1, and would begin marketing for the facility at that time as well.