If you’re planning a business meeting, annual general meeting, or even a birthday party at Genesis Place, the room rental fees will be increasing in the fall.

The City of Airdrie is hiking the rental fees after comparing the rates to similar facilities offered in Airdrie and in the Calgary area. The discounted fee for not-for-profit groups will also be eliminated.

City Council recently approved the rate increases for most of the meeting and multipurpose rooms.

The cost to rent out the Echo room will see the biggest increase at $38.16 per hour it will be going up by $16.53 from its current rate.

The Auto Body meeting room will also go up to $38.16 per hour, an increase of $8.73. The Rotary room will be the most expensive at a rate of $58.73, up $4.65.

The Multipurpose room will go up $5.71, to $38.16 per hour. The City aid these rates were chosen because they are the averages based on similar facilities.

Mayor Peter Brown said the increases are needed in order to pay for the services being provided by the facility.

“It’s marginal, we haven’t gone up in price since I believe they were built, I don’t think there’s been an increase, so to me, they’re relatively small,” said Brown.

Brown said he knows fee increases are never welcome but the City needs to ensure the recreation centre is being adequately funded.

“At the end of the day no one likes an increase, certainly I don’t, but we have to pay for our facilities,” Brown explained.

“In order to be economically sustainable it’s one of the things this council and previous councils have always charged administration fees, our recovery costs were like $0.92 cents on the dollar and that keeps dropping.”

In order to mitigate the impact of fee increases on the not-for-profit organizations who meet there, the city has reduced the fee for renting the Acon and Lumley rooms by $7.90. they will now cost $19.08 per hour to rent out.

The new room rental fees will go into effect on September 1, 2019.