Trout Lake Community Centre — Local services in Vancouver

The gym does not have proper leg equipment for beginners, including a leg extension machine and a proper leg press for loadable weight plates. This should be remedied. For such a large gym (compared to many other Parks Board gyms), it has a surprising lack of specific equipment. This is one of my least favourite Vancouver gyms to go to.

Trout Lake's new building has a bizarre design. The men's and women's change rooms adjoining the gym are incredibly small and awkward. There are a very limited number of lockers and they are located within a confined L-shaped area within each change room that only two people can comfortably occupy while others have to wait to enter the area. There is also a steam room randomly located right between the two change rooms. The entrance to the steam room faces the weight gym, which means every time the steam room opens, steam enters the gym. Also, patrons with their shirts off and other swim clothing have to expose themselves to the weight gym environment in order to exit and enter the change rooms from the steam room. It makes no sense to have a steam room inside of a weight gym in such an exposed location, that is not inside the change rooms. The rules of weight gyms in the Parks Board is that people must be fully clothed, and yet a steam room that exits to the full view of gym goers would seem to contradict that. It's mystifying how Vancouver Parks invested so much money into this building redesign and construction only to include such awkwardly-placed features.

An unrelated issue is that the community centre never remains open during special events in the park, so none of its many washrooms are accessible on high-volume event days. Instead, people only have access to the utterly outdated, disgusting and low-capacity washrooms on the south side of the park, each of which only contain one or two stalls. So on special event days when there are literally thousands of people in the park, you only have one grimy washroom with two stalls serving everybody. Trout Lake Community Centre sticks to its business hours no matter what, closing at 5pm on both Saturday and Sunday. Meanwhile in the summertime, the park is fully occupied until sundown which is 9pm or later! It's ludicrous. What kind of community centre refuses to serve the populated park it is...

I hope the security guards aren't paid with taxpayer money. They just sit there, three of them, behind the front desk, chatting.

You'll have your things stolen here out of the locker room / washroom. That's not the surprising part. Security is unwilling to help or do anything about it whatsoever. Get this, they're unable to access their own security footage. The security team. Can't access security footage. Why not? It's like the best tool security guards have.

You should consider letting your security guards access security cameras. I can't even believe that needs to be said. It's obvious. That way they might actually be able to do meaningful work instead of just shrugging their shoulders and saying "you can call the police". Thanks for the help.

There was only one group of what sounded like three people that entered the washroom after I did. They left before I left. If we simply looked at the security footage we 100% could have identified the thieves. But you'd rather just let thieves run amuck around your facility than have your security guards access security camera footage? That doesn't even make sense. What is your security team for if not this very situation?

I came outside the front and approached the group of teenagers that were obviously the ones in the washroom. Two of the security guards were there with them, just hanging out. The mastermind thieves didn't deny being in the washroom... Yet deny taking my bottle... With a basic understanding of physics, you can easily conclude they took the bottle. Unless a ninja came in and I didn't hear them. The security guards who we're just chillin with the thieves didn't say or do anything. It's not even about the bottle or the value of it. I don't like thieves. I guess Trout Lake community center doesn't really seem to mind them.

Hope the thief reads this one day. I kept that bottle in my trunk as an emergency piss bottle, as I do night shift deliveries and there are virtually no public washrooms in the middle of the night. I simply brought it in to empty into the toilet. I didn't even rinse it because it was a public sink. Hope it's served you well. The red clear bottle, just to remove any wishful...

Recently at 5:50 pm on a Saturday the rink next door, during a kids hockey game with over 100 people attending, the men's and women's bathrooms were both out of toilet paper, the family bathroom was not accessible and no attendant was on site to speak with. Moms were looking for anywhere to have their kids use the bathroom but there were no options. One mom had 3 kids and was just at a loss. I went next door to Trout Lake Community Centre for assistance but doors were already locked and there was only one teenage/young twenties female staffer all by herself avoiding eye contact through the glass despite my knocking (daytime hours with families outside) and reluctant to come to the door to help. Finally spoke to her about the situation and she seemed clueless on what to do or how to begin to help. I asked her what I should tell all the people about where to go especially all the families with young kids. She was like a deer in headlights and just said she'd try to find someone. I asked if we could her facility restroom and she said no. Didn't even offer to grab some bathroom tissue supplies for me to take. She did not in fact resolve the situation at all. What a bizarre experience. I wonder how many kids had to go to the bathroom in the parking lot or field. Why on earth would you leave a staffer unwilling/incapable of dealing with public and urgent problems working all alone, it should be someone who can take charge. Seems there were multiple failures at both the rink and the community centre that day and in their overall training/scheduling. Never seen anything like it in all the community centres I've visited. A high-end-looking facility with a very...