Public Commons

Part of 2012

Hello Stephen,
thanks for the follow-up.

You suggest entering the donations as sundry revenues because (a) the amounts are proceeds from sales and (b) there is a cost to the city to generate this revenue.

This needs some clarification: (a) these are not sales, they are voluntary donations, because if people don't want to donate they are not required to do so. Some people don't donate at all and some donate more than is suggested. See for example the suggested donation for the campfire program: http://dufferinpark.ca/campfires/wiki/wiki.php?n=Campfires.CampfiresWelcome.

(b) there is always a cost to generate donations revenue -- e.g. the Parks and Trees Foundation has Arthur Beauregard, who costs the city a manager's salary.

But that's not the only issue here. You asked me to note a P-code on the cheques, but since the beginning of August CELOS has not been dealing directly with the donations: http://publiccommons.ca/library/docextracts/7316. The donations are handled by the city staff who work directly with these programs.

The donations are quite a bit larger than the numbers you have been looking at -- you've been seeing the balance after expenses. You can see the donations and expenses summary table from 2006 to 2011 here http://publiccommons.ca/library/docfiles/6073 And here are the last two months of publicly available Quickbooks exports relating to some of the Ward 18 parks since CELOS stopped handling the accounting:

http://publiccommons.ca/library/docfiles/6075 http://publiccommons.ca/library/docfiles/6936

It may be that there has been some recent discussion at City Hall about how to deal with this issue, but the people who make it work have not been invited to the table, or even notified. Maybe it's time?

Jutta
416 533-0153