The purpose of his delegation was to ask for the Town’s support with the establishment of available summer ice at the Caledon East Arena, a complex that is about to open a second ice pad.

“I feel our program will grow over time, but without the establishment of summer ice, we can’t get the registrants,” said Eccleston.

Caledon’s Council did not give full support to the idea, as some wanted to see what the taxpayer cost was, and others wanted to know who was going to take advantage, and who was going to benefit.

“Should we advertise this to other parts of the community?” asked Regional Councillor Richard Paterak. “It’s tough for us to take a tax payer hit for subsidizing a private business. I would like to see other rates, and other groups.”

“I disagree,” said Area Councillor Doug Beffort. Beffort was vocal in his support for the idea, and said that even if it were a tax payer hit now, this is something people he has been speaking to have expressed a serious desire for and something he believes will begin to see easy cost recovery in the future.

“There are a lot of inconsistencies in the report, according to what happened at the ice user meeting,” said Beffort. The Town report on the feasibility of summer ice explained that there wasn’t the consistent demand in Caledon to meet the minimum demand requirements that would be needed to offset the costs to the Town.

But as Beffort said, he believed the Parks and Recreation department had dropped the ball.

When we built that new arena (Caledon East) we were told by the second year we would have it,” he said. “But by the second year we were supposed to have it. This is the second year. My concern is that there was not an opportunity for people to react to the option.”

“I think we have a gold mine here,” added Beffort. “We have to start somewhere, but we’re not going to get it done if there’s a reluctance amongst our Parks and Rec staff to get it done.”

Manager of the Parks and Recreation department, Eriks Eglite, presented the staff report and refuted the comments made by Councillor Beffort.

“We’ve gone out two times in the past eight months,” said Eglite. “When the budget item came to council, the request was to go to (ice) users again, we did that. We identified a cost of $27,000, and the fact is, we don’t have $27,000 in the budget.”

Regional Councillor Richard Whitehead reminded the council that outside of the money for putting on summer ice, they had another beast to tackle. The noise created by the ice maintenance equipment at the Caledon East arena was already a burden to residents in the area, and until that problem is solved, adding to how much ice the arena has to produce would not be a good move.

The majority of council agreed with Whitehead’s conclusion, and the report for summer ice was deferred to a later council meeting until a consultant can comment on suggested solutions to mitigate the noise.

Until then, the idea of summer hockey in Caledon is well, on ice.