CHIL is a group of people working with the City to keep an ice rink open in the Longmont community.
An ice facility for the Longmont community is important to its citizens. The proposed “Quail Campus” facility is many years away and our only near-term option is to keep the Ice Pavilion at Roosevelt Park functioning. Given that, there are several immediate focus areas for CHIL.
- Spreading the word, PR, and encouraging patronage
This is our immediate focus. We’re working to get the word out to the community that “ice is back” and get people out skating this year. We want to show the City Council that an ice rink is important to the citizens of Longmont and the best way to do that is to get people skating! - Fundraising for the future
The equipment used at the Ice Pavilion is aging and likely won’t last beyond this season. Purchasing new, or even “nearly new” equipment is something that the City doesn’t have funds available for. Funding ways to help the City fund this equipment will make it much easier to keep our ice open. - Providing input to ice programs and operations
From ice hockey to figure skating to public skating, we’re looking at ways to make the operations at the Pavilion more user friendly and help improve the experience for the public. While we can’t please all the people all the time, we can certainly look for ways to improve things based on citizen feedback.
There’s lots of detail behind those 3 initiatives, fund raising alone is a massive effort with many different aspects and we’re in the early stages of defining these functions and building teams to drive them.
Who is CHIL?
It’s everyone who wants to keep ice in Longmont. There are lots of people who’ve been involved on their own and in small groups to help get the ice facility open. Some of us have been writing letters to the paper, others talking to City Council, still others working with the City Recreation department. A few of us banded together to form CHIL and to begin growing the team and focusing our efforts. We don’t have a president, treasurer or other formal organization at this point… perhaps that will come as we the group grows, perhaps it will just work organically, we’ll see what’s needed to keep us effective. This is about ice for the community, not about titles, but we need leaders to make progress and those leaders will come from the CHIL ranks.
If you’d like to help, we’d love to have you join our team! Contact us at joinchil@clue.com.
