Boards go up at La Glace's new arena - CSV Midstream Solutions

The boards came in part through the Creating Shared Value Fund after a decade of community fundraising.

Kids have had the run of the new arena in La Glace since before there was ice in it, riding bikes and playing basketball on the concrete floor that everyone in town is waiting to skate on.

La Glace is a small town northwest of Grande Prairie, flanked by farmers’ fields where Highway 59 meets Highway 724, and the old arena that runs alongside the road is dwarfed now by the new building beside it. A volunteer board spent a decade getting it built, and it opens this October.

Everything inside is new, including the boards that went up around the ice over the summer.

Earlier this year the La Glace and District Agricultural Society, the volunteer organization that runs the town’s recreation facilities, applied to the Creating Shared Value Fund for those boards, and it was named one of five organizations in the region to receive funding.

Derek Nyland farms grain about three kilometres from the arena and is president of the society. He has been waiting years for a full-size rink in La Glace, because the old one is well past its time.

“Being a small town, a space like this is huge,” Nyland says. “It’s a way where kids get to know each other outside of school, but also parents. You don’t know your neighbours a lot until you get together.”

Volunteers put the old arena up in the 1950s and added to it into the early ’70s. It has been the town’s gathering place ever since, and Nyland laughs as he describes the move into the new building where the puck dropped on October 15.

The concrete under the old ice had started to heave, Nyland says, so the sheet came in thick in some spots and thin in others and the plant had to work harder to freeze it. There were places in the building where you could see daylight through the wall, and it would “rain in the lobby,” Nyland says.

Its last winter ran without the refrigeration system that makes and maintains the ice, and warm weather did the rest, so La Glace got about two weeks of quality ice for skating out of a whole season.

The building has gone up through a community-led effort that has raised about $11 million since 2016, and the boards were one of the last steps.

The Creating Shared Value Fund that helped pay for the boards is an initiative launched earlier this year by CSV Midstream Solutions to help fund community initiatives around the company’s Albright gas plant. The funding comes from revenue rather than profit, so it pays out for as long as the plant is running instead of being approved one year at a time the way a traditional donations budget works.

CSV provides the funding, while a guiding committee of community members reads the applications and picks the recipients. The Northwestern Alberta Foundation administers the Fund and signs off on the committee’s choices, which keeps the decisions with the people living closest to the plant. That’s what Creating Shared Value means, and what the letters in CSV stand for: a company earning its money in ways that, at the same time, strengthens the region around it.

Nyland takes the local committee as a compliment to La Glace.

“Having community members involved, I think it’s great,” he says. “They know what’s going on in the community more than people elsewhere so that is actually a bit of a compliment. That’s a great way to do it.”

Nyland is the third generation of his family on the land he farms, and the second to run the ag society.

“When industry steps in and helps, it’s huge, and I think that’s the way it should be,” Nyland says. “The better local people do, the more you see it come into the community.”

Minor hockey, four adult teams, ringette, figure skating and the school’s skating program will all move in this year now that the boards are in. Nyland says a new women’s team will also use the rink as its home ice, and ringette has drawn players from as far as Peace River and Spirit River.

Malin Sandboe, the society’s vice president, has been raising money for the building since the start, and he says the decade it took came down to one thing.

“It’s funding. It’s absolutely funding,” Sandboe says. “What we went through since starting this was Covid, and obviously lately trade wars, and every year there’s something that drives the cost up.”

The society built in stages as the money came in, trying to get the new arena finished before the old one gave out.

“We didn’t quite make it, but we got there shortly after,” Sandboe says. “Hopefully the community of La Glace, and a lot of people in the county, won’t have to worry about ice for quite some time.”

For Nyland, a full-size rink means the kids who grew up together, and went to school together since kindergarten, get to keep playing together.

“It means a lot to them, and it means a lot to the community as a whole,” Nyland says.