Winkler Mayor calls new Child Care initiative 'extremely innovative,' Council to meet with stakeholders

Winkler's mayor says the new child care capital initiative recently announced by the province is extremely innovative and unique. 

As part of the deal, local partners will provide a minimum of two acres of serviced land with 15 years of free rent and support services including snow removal, landscape maintenance and repairs in order to reduce costs for child-care operators, ensuring long-term sustainability of centres.
    
Henry Siemens says whenever you're dealing with a unique program, it takes some time to, "wrap your head around the idea, and what can and can't be done."

"A couple of things that came out of that was. A: we don't have a lot of developable serviced land ready to go in a place that this would make great sense that we wouldn't have to buy ourselves. And as that discussion moved on, it kind of came to two key pieces. One, let's make sure that there is an established need. That demonstrated need component that's a requirement here."

Siemens says, as they continued looking at different ideas and different thoughts, one that quickly came to the forefront was the idea of the hospital itself. With the hospital expansion underway, he said council decided they will broach the idea of a potential partnership with the BTHC Foundation.

"When we had the presentation from Boundary Trails (BTHC Foundation) and they showed what they were looking to build and where the expansion was going to be, one of the questions that members of our Council asked was, is there a daycare component to it? We know that when schools are built, there's a requirement to attach daycares to each one of them," noted Siemens.

Siemens says the hospital expansion will naturally bring a number of additional people working in that area, many of them will likely be young parents. Therefore, he says Council felt, as this came up, that potentially, because there is some open space there, potentially this might be the right fit there. 

"And inside that project itself, based on the cost, and they were looking at a ballpark number of about $700 per square foot, there's not a daycare on the planet that makes sense with math like that...Obviously we don't speak for the hospital, there's no thought in that regard, but possibly if there's a partnership opportunity where the cost is more reasonable, and the capital costs are covered through this program, then potentially this is an option to add the daycare space that will for sure be needed when that expansion happens and the additional staff get hired."