It was an opportunity for assembled media to take a peek inside the ongoing work at the Fairview East arena in Swift Current yesterday as Mayor Denis Perrault and Swift Current MLA Everett Hindley held a scrum event inside the rink as it undergoes renovations.

Announced back in July as part of the government's Municipal Economic Enhancement Program (MEEP), the replacement of the arena's floor and headers was one of two projects that received funding along with a soon-to-be-underway sewer upgrade to Friesen Street.

Talking about the project, Perrault said that the 43-year-old arena floor and header had been identified early on in the MEEP application process.

"This one was identified as being a priority because it was starting to fail. This is a very well used facility. With it being a little over 40 years old, the header and the pipes were definitely failing and it was an opportunity for us to move forward quickly and get the project done, hopefully giving us another 40 or 50 years out of the ice surface."

He added that with sports like Lacrosse becoming increasingly popular in the southwest, converting the dirt floor into concrete will provide more opportunities outside of hockey season.

Everett Hindley, the local Swift Current MLA was on hand at the scrum. He talked about what he felt was the focus of the MEEP program; feeling that it was important to show that the 7.5 billion dollar program wasn't only going to big cities but to smaller communities as well.

"So often people think that these funding projects only end up in big cities, but in the case of MEEP, it's not the case. It's important to highlight these projects so that people can see provincial money being invested into their communities to help them recover from the global pandemic that we're all experiencing right now."

While the MEEP program itself is not new; having been used once before in Hindley believes 2009 or so, this is the first time that it has been used in response to a global crisis on the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That pandemic, and the economic hit that accompanied it as businesses were forced to shut down, was the reason for the program's insistence on having projects that were shovel-ready and able to begin quickly. With the focus being to hopefully put more people back to work on municipal infrastructure projects.

"This was about providing a program and an application process where we could go to municipalities and say 'what do you have that you can work on right now?'. Not that has to go through an engineering phase or a feasibility study or all that other stuff but projects that will be ready to go now."

The Fairview Arena upgrade is reportedly a little over fifty percent complete.