Steinbach city council has spent the past four days in Edmonton, attending the annual convention of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Mayor Chris Goertzen says members of council also used the opportunity to visit some nearby communities to check out their cultural arts centres.

"We were able to tour Fort Saskatchewan, their performing arts centre, as well as Camrose. We got a lot of good feedback from them about what they really like about their centres, what they think they might want to improve about their centres and that will help us in our master planning process as we move forward."

Goertzen says one thing stood out in their discussions.

"It was very clear that they had some very professional staff managing these performing arts centres which allowed them to be more efficient and allowed them to provide more services to the community at the same time."

Goertzen says both of the arts centres they looked at seated about 600 people which is slightly smaller than the 750 being discussed for Steinbach. He adds it was interesting to hear them talk about what worked for them in terms of numbers yet remaining well aware that Steinbach is not quite the same as these communities.

Meanwhile, Goertzen says discussions at the FCM convention largely focused on trying to convince the federal government to invest a lot more money into infrastructure. He adds there is some optimism among delegates that something will be done, especially with a federal election coming up later this year.