Public Commons

Part of City Spending

This is our park’s research arm. Dufferin Grove Park is in many ways a lovely place, an open-air community centre with trees and flowers instead of walls. But there are some puzzles. Why are the paths on one side of the park paved, while down the centre of the park, and on the other side, we have only dirt tracks, alternately muddy or dusty? The fact is, no money has found its way into the park to fix the path, nor to fix much else, in a good long time. Yet there’s a park levy by-law (pointed out to us by Andrea Dawber, from Dovercourt Park) that requires every new housing development to contribute a set percentage to be used for improving nearby parks. We’ve had recent local housing developments in this area. Where did that money go? Kevin Beaulieu at our city councillor’s office is looking into it but so far the records seem to have been misfiled.

A different question: How come there’s $803,000 to do a repeat parks and recreation facilities-audit, when a thorough facilities-audit was done in 2001 (for $392,448)? $1.2 million spent to make a list and then make the list again - at the same time as there was very little money directed to fixing the problems that even the first audit listed (for example, at our rink). How did that happen?

And yet another question: Why has the city spent over $6 million to tear down some very fine city park playgrounds since 1999 and replace them with frequently quite inferior playgrounds, with almost half of those contracts going to one playground manufacturer (Henderson)? Why has the city justified this on the grounds of new standards which are not law, but are put out by the Canadian Standards Association? The C.S.A. is not only made up of over 90 per cent manufacturers, but - even more remarkably - that association specifically recommended that its new design standards not be applied to already existing playgrounds. So why the big panic, in parks as well as schoolyards?

Any city as big as Toronto is full of such questions. Insofar as the answers may be important to the good order of our public spaces, it’s important to track them down. Maybe many of our civic troubles will turn out to be the fault of the giant multi-national insurance companies, which dictate policy with their premiums, and strangle the independent good sense of policymakers. We can’t know until we do the research.

But we can’t do the research very well either. Despite Mayor Miller’s popular election posture with a broom, and his promise to open city hall to the citizens, it’s been really hard for our CELOS research group to get answers to our questions. Straight answers from city staff have been rare. When our requests were ignored by staff, we sought help from the city’s Corporate Access and Privacy Office. The law says: When citizens seek information from their government, they should be given that information within 30 days or told why not.

Out of nine access for information requests our research group made, one got a response within the required 30 days, and all the rest either got a late response (between one and three months late), or no response at all. That’s not very good. So in the last week of September we contacted the Access and Privacy Office again, also Parks and Recreation Acting General Manager Brenda Librecz and our own City Councillor Adam Giambrone. Hopefully they’ll straighten it out.

There are several Freedom of Information responses we did get by now that are pretty interesting. To further Mayor David Miller’s promise of an open city hall, we’ve posted the information on our park web site. To take a look, go to www.dufferinpark.ca and click on "research." Secrecy, be gone!