By Marcia Love
Visitors to Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park may not notice any changes to the services and programs offered to them, but the park is seeing a number of cutbacks this year.
The Saskatchewan government’s funding to provincial parks’ operating budgets was reduced by $1 million this year. As a result, Cypress Park lost employee positions and employee hours in many of its departments.
The park must reduce its employee hours this year by the equivalent of 28 months of labour.
“We had a reduction for every provincial park. Mostly we shortened some seasons of existing staff and tried to make the cuts in such a way that it would have minimal impact on our visitors,” said Cindy MacDonald, acting manager of Southern Park Operations with the Ministry of Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport. “We tried to make cuts either early in the season or into the fall, where the visitors maybe don’t notice it as much.”
Staff was reduced in park maintenance, sales and services, visitor services, interpreter programs and at the pool. One staff position was eliminated from each area, with remaining staff seeing reduced work hours and length of employment to meet provincial park allotments.
MacDonald said cost reduction was also made possible by eliminating vacant positions.
Part of the process was to include the pool closing two weeks earlier than previous years.
“(Funding reductions) played a role, but we also had some challenges in our pool staffing in that a number of our employees are students and some had asked for early layoffs so they could prepare to go back to school,” MacDonald explained. “So we were a little bit short of qualified lifeguards towards the end of August.”
However, after visitors voiced their concerns about the early pool closure, arrangements were made to keep the pool open until Labour Day weekend, which is when it would normally close.
This was the first cutback at the park which directly affected visitors.
More reductions in next year’s provincial park funding may result in the closure of a program or further decreases in employment.