Some changes are coming to the southeast stairway of Affinity Place following a case of vandalism that cost the city during the season.

Facility staff sent the memo to the Estevan city council, which was read and looked at the case during this week's meeting.

Mayor Roy Ludwig read off some of the issues they'd been having from a door being propped open.

"We've had a number of problems here outlined as follows. The stairwell's main level exterior emergency exit door has been continuously propped open by smokers, causing over $1000 in damages to the door and the latching door closure hardware. This is designed as an emergency exit only. In order to meet fire code and stop vandals from entering the stairwell or ice-level dressing rooms, it must be closed and locked."

Leaving the door open has given youths access to the skybox levels and dressing rooms, which led to serious damages following one tournament.

"After one tournament weekend, it was found all the hand sanitizing stations in the sky box level had been vandalized. It has also been found that they are using the stairwell to access locker rooms when teams are on the ice. The heater in the stairwell was shut off as kids were playing with it, causing the sprinkler line to freeze and blow out the sprinkler head."

"This was a costly expense not only to call in the on-call staff, but also for the cost of labour for custodial to mop up the water in the stairwell and hallway. The call-in cost alone for Vipond was $1200."

Two solutions were proposed by the staff to fix the problem:

  1. Lock the doors so that only staff and patrons exiting in an emergency will have access to these doors. Vendors and any visiting teams will be lent a cart and will need to unload through the front doors.
  2. Install an alarm horn that would go off if the door was opened to stop the use of the door. A switch would be installed to turn off the alarm to let vendors have access to use the door for unloading.

The second solution was recommended by the staff, as a light system is already activated when the door is opened, and a horn would not be overly expensive.

When questioned on cost, Facility manager Matt Angell says that'll be relatively cheap.

"We believe it would be under like $100, like it's just a small horn that would be attached to it just to make it as the light lights up the horn go off. Just stopping kids from opening the door, people from using it too much." 

Council made a motion to go with the second solution which was passed unanimously.