Local walking track renewed

Fort St. John has done something modest and practical. It renewed the sponsorship license for the indoor walking track at the Pomeroy Sport Centre for another 15 years. The sponsor is NVT Logistics, the company formerly known as Northern Vac Services. The city announced the renewal on April 2 and scheduled a public celebration on the track for April 7 from 5 to 7 p.m. That kind of deal can sound like branding paperwork. In this case, it is more useful than that. The city says the agreement helps keep the track accessible year-round and helps offset operating costs at a facility that gets heavy use in a place where weather can shut down easy outdoor exercise for months at a time. The walking and running track logs about 27,000 visits a year, according to the city. That number matters because this is not a niche amenity tucked into a larger arena. The Pomeroy Sport Centre is one of Fort St. John’s main recreation hubs. The city describes it as a major multi-sport complex with two NHL-sized rinks, an Olympic-sized speed skating oval, and a walking track suspended from the third floor. It opened in 2010 and, in winter, the broader facility sees more than 60,000 visits a month. The track itself fills a very specific gap. It is indoors. It is heated. It is free. A recent city activity challenge told residents to log laps on the “FREE” walking track at the Pomeroy Sport Centre, which is a blunt reminder of what the city is trying to preserve here: not elite training space, but dependable public movement. That is especially useful in northern British Columbia, where spring is not always the gentle thaw the calendar promises. The renewal also lands during a broader reshuffling of names around the building. In March, the city thanked Pomeroy Lodging for more than 15 years of support tied to the sport centre’s naming rights and said it would seek new naming-rights partners for several recreation assets. Against that backdrop, locking in the walking track sponsor for another decade and a half looks less like routine maintenance and more like one piece of a longer plan to stabilize funding around public recreation. There is a small civic logic to that. Cities often struggle to keep low-cost amenities open because the things people use most casually can be the hardest to defend in budget terms. A free indoor track does not generate the obvious revenue of a tournament or a ticketed event. It just gets used, over and over, by walkers, runners, older residents, people rehabbing injuries, and anyone who wants a safe loop without ice, traffic, or darkness. Fort St. John’s own language makes clear that this is what the city thinks it is buying with the sponsorship renewal: recreation, rehabilitation, and social connection, all in one circuit above the ice. On April 7, the city and NVT Logistics plan to mark the deal on the track itself, inside the Pomeroy Sport Centre at 9324 96 Street.