There will soon be new hours at the Okotoks Eco Centre.
Okotoks town council approved changing operating times for the Eco Centre at its March 12 meeting. The centre will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Tuesday through Saturday, and it will be closed on Sundays, Mondays and statutory holidays. The change sees the centre open one hour earlier each week day and one hour later on Saturdays, and eliminates evening hours on Thursdays.
The new hours will come into effect on April 3.
“We took into consideration how many people were actually using the Eco Centre during the hours we discontinued,” said Paul Lyons, waste services manager. “We saw people weren’t coming in the times we thought they might have come in.”
He said the new hours will not reduce the amount of time the Eco Centre is open per week, but will restructure its operation to better suit the needs of residents.
There were comments from the public that opening earlier on weekdays would be beneficial, as many people tried to schedule their recycling drop-off with school times or other appointments, he said.
“When we looked at that we found a number of residents were turning up between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. before we were open,” said Lyons.
This is the second time the Eco Centre has changed its hours in two years. In 2016, the centre was open seven days per week but Lyons said the introduction of curbside recycling carts community-wide lowered demand for the centre.
The Town first offered later hours on Thursdays and opened one hour earlier on Saturdays to try to accommodate residents who may not be able to make it to the Eco Centre during the work day, but the amount of traffic was lower than expected, he said.
“We considered residents who were driving back from Calgary and perhaps needed to come in to do a drop-off or something else that’s not regular,” said Lyons. “But we’ve seen that after 12 months of data and 16 months of observation that it was not the case.”
He said the Town will continue to evaluate its operational hours at the Eco Centre to see if new trends emerge that would warrant further changes.
