After the previous council allocated $1 million for the York Creek Lodge expansion, the municipality will need to borrow $700,000 to honour the pledge.
In 2010, the municipality committed the million dollars on condition that the federal and provincial governments would help fund the expansion.
“The York Creek group came to council at that time,” said Councillor Dean Ward at a meeting on Oct. 7, 2014. “They told us during the presentation that if the community showed some kind of support toward the project it would go a long way towards making this thing successful.”
Ward said council agreed to start putting away $100,000 per year starting in 2011.
Last summer, the York Creek Lodge received a $9.12 million grant to fund the project.
But the municipality didn’t save any money in 2013 or 2014 though $200,000 has been identified from 2011 and 2012 said CAO Sheldon Steinke.
In an email interview, Steinke said the municipality has $300,000 set aside in reserve for the project and it is the long-term financing plan to borrow the remaining $700,000 in 2015 or 2016 depending on final confirmation from the lodge.

Last summer, the governments of Canada and Alberta announced a combined investment of some $47 million to help seniors in need of affordable housing. Five seniors’ lodges in Alberta are receiving funding to build new or renovate existing units, including York Creek, which will receive 28 new units while the existing units will be enlarged.
Susan Demchuk, York Creek Lodge operations manager, said the expansion will mean much more living space for the lodge’s residents whose room sizes will increase from 190 to about 380 square feet.
Opened in 1980, York Creek Lodge was built by the Alberta Housing Corporation and managed by The Pass Foundation. Its room sizes were standard for the 1970s but they don’t accommodate the age and physical disabilities of some of the seniors, said Demchuk.
“The size of a room is not conducive to having a walker or a wheel chair,” she said. “When you put in a bed, a television, a dresser and a reclining chair, there’s not much room for anything else.”