friends of dufferin grove park
February-March 2006 Newsletter
posted February 18, 2006
 

Archives

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Newsletter prepared by:
Jutta Mason

Illustrations:
Jane LowBeer

Technical support:
John Culbert

Webmasters:
Henrik Bechmann,
Joe Adelaars

Park phone:
416 392-0913

street address:
875 Dufferin Street

E-mail: mail@dufferinpark.ca

Park photographer: Wallie Seto

Printing:
Quality Control Printing at Bloor and St. George

Volume 7, Number 2, February-March 2006

Comments? editor@dufferinpark.ca

EVENTS IN FEBRUARY AND MARCH

Saturday February 18, 6 to 9 p.m. Fourth annual bike race on ice. Mostly but not only bike couriers. They put screws into their tires (between 700 and 1100 screws), facing out, to give them traction. If they fall, it can be a bit gory. But they have a lot of fun. There will be pizza from the outdoor oven. Indoors there will be a small group of musicians having a little jam, including two of the rink staff, Jake Sherman on drums and Nick Cameron on triangle, plus our webmaster Henrik's son, Karl Bechmann, on keyboard. If it’s really cold out, the east windows looking out on the rink are a good vantage point to see the races and enjoy the music, with a mug of hot chocolate or fair trade coffee.

Friday February 24, 6 p.m. Friday Night Supper marks the opening of “Seasons of Dufferin Grove,” photographs of the park by Laura Berman: “Images that explore the eclectic spirit of the community, people, and activities of Dufferin Grove Park.” Laura’s beautiful photos will be displayed on the walls of the rink house until March 11. She features the cob project from the summer, the farmers’ market, the Night of Dread parade and the women’s shinny hockey tournament.

Saturday February 25, 1.30 to 4 p.m. The Jimmie Simpson "hockey in the neighbourhood" kids will come over with their bus for a couple of hours to do drills with Dufferin Rink kids 6 to 12, and follow up with a shinny hockey tourney. Kids can register with the rink staff (ask at the zamboni café). The Jimmie Simpson coaches often join the adult shinny hockey game after 9 p.m. at Dufferin Rink, and we’ve heard about their excellent program, so we’re honoured that they accepted out invitation.

Sunday February 26, 2.30 to 4.30: there will be a DJ (rink staff/ DJ Ted Carlisle) on a special stage on the ice, with good ice skating/dancing tunes. The zamboni cafe will be staffed by Clay and Paper Theatre's puppets, plus extra rink guards will be puppets too (on skates, with fluorescent vests of course). There will be special, tasty food from the ovens. This is year 5 of an attempt to have a goodbye-party for the main part of the rink season (not counting the extension). We’re trying to make a party that’s lively but not crammed inside the rink house (frustrating) like some of our other attempts. We’re stealing the DJ idea from Harbourfront Rink, a rink which has been an inspiration to us this season, and which has also given us a gold standard of outdoor ice maintenance.

Monday February 27 to Sunday March 19: rink season extension. November was a cold month with low sun, and we tried hard to get the City to open selected double-pad rinks in the third week. But the decision was to open later than last year (December 10 for most rinks) and then extend the season into March. Since the ice is by now far too thick for the compressors to freeze it properly in warmer weather, and the sun is much higher, there may not be a lot of skateable days in March even with the compressors working 24/7. It will be a matter of luck. If the weather is cloudy and not too warm, there’s a fairly good chance that the rink will be skateable in the evenings. The hope is also there that the skating lessons can last through to the end – March 11. We’ll have limited rink house staffing, according to the weather, and we’ll keep the phone message updated for ice conditions. Call 416 392-0913 for up-to-date rink information.

March 3, 6 p.m. Friday Night Supper cooked by guest chef Gita Seaton, a park pen-pal (e-mail) friend who just came back from a cooking stint in Japan. Gita worked there at a high-end restaurant that was so formal that the cooks had to wait until the last guest left and bow them out. Only then could the cooking staff go home to sleep. Gita says that people in Japan don’t seem to sleep much anyway, mostly just work. She’s attracted to cooking a meal at the park because she wants to see if it’s possible to do the work she loves – cooking farmers’ market food – without the high-end fussing. She’ll work with the park cooks and they’ll have some fun, and so will the eaters.

At that supper, there will be new postings of the latest information about running the rink with a community board of management.

March 10, 6.p.m. Friday Night Supper. Like last year, the last few Friday Night Suppers of this winter will be combined with some park-or-neighborhood-related discussions. Last year there was a Friday Night Supper where Georgie Donais suggested building a cob courtyard, and look what happened! This year, the March 10 supper will have one table for people who want to discuss an “emergency preparedness group” for this neighbourhood. This idea was prompted by the news that the Canadian government is training soldiers to control the population of cities in case of a catastrophic epidemic of Avian Flu. Accounts of what happened in New Orleans this summer, and some recollections of the big hydro blackout here a few years ago, make it seem prudent not to rely completely on governments in times of trouble. During the hydro blackout, the park became an important source of water for people in high-rises, of cooling-off, and of (sometimes inaccurate) news for people living nearby. Now there’s a possibility that the park will become a wireless internet node, life-saving in cases like New Orleans. If you’re interested in joining a conversation about what else is needed for emergency preparedness, leave a message for park friend Mary Jane Young at the rink house (416 392-0913) and Mary Jane will call you back.

THOUGHTS ABOUT PARKS

What the park costs:

Parks and Recreation Director Don Boyle said at the recent Dufferin Rink meeting that he was shocked to find out how much money was spent to staff this park in 2005, and that he intended to cut the staff back to 2004 levels.

It seems like it’s time to clear up a few things about Dufferin Grove Park and our taxes.

In 2005, the City spent $181,440 of our taxes (counting benefits) for between 6 and 14 part-time recreation staff for our “community centre without walls.” This number covered the park for seven days a week during the busy times, less at other times. In contrast, in 2004 the City spent about $81,000 to staff the park. $81,000 isn’t enough now that the park has become a destination for people from all over the city. The number of people who use Dufferin Grove Park year-round is now quite a bit higher than the number who use most Toronto community centres with walls.

Community recreation centres with walls cost at least half a million dollars to run (some quite a bit more) per year. The City has quite few such centres, and plans to build more. There are a lot of Parks, Forestry and Recreation staff – over 4000. Over half work for recreation centres. They are centrally managed. Besides the general manager, there are six directors (up from four in 2004), each of whom costs the city between $110,000 and $138,000 a year. Under these directors there are thirty-six managers. Some of these managers seem to manage management: three of them are managers of standards and innovation, five are managers of management services, one is a manager of Agenda Coordination and Service integration. The thirty-six managers cost the city between $81,000 and $117,500 a year each, before bonuses.

That’s why many community recreation centres have to charge extra for most of their activities. $212 million tax money for this year’s Parks, Forestry and Recreation operating budget is not enough, so Parks and Recreation needs to take in another $72 million from user fees.

For some years now, a few of us around the park have been wondering whether there is a cheaper way to “build strong neighborhoods” (as the City’s slogan goes) than building more $15 million community centres that cost so much to run.

A community laboratory

Dufferin Grove Park is a kind of laboratory of community. It turns out that people in this neighborhood have a talent for being neighborly. At the park, people not only act friendly, but also work out conflicts, struggle with suspicion, get over insults, or shyness, or language barriers, or fear of dogs, or fear of young people. Working out difficulties among neighbours seems to stick people together just as much as sharing celebrations does, and people at this park do both.

Some years ago, a few of us thought, if such a “park as public space laboratory” brings out people’s talents here, why not elsewhere? So a few of us went to see Don Boyle and his boss Claire Tucker Reid and said: “please designate Dufferin Grove Park a lab. See how much money the park really needs, without relying on unpaid work in any big way. Call what goes on there an experiment, a different kind of community centre – let’s be curious, see what might be applied elsewhere, see if that could actually save money in the long run and reduce the user fees.

We couldn’t get their interest then. Last year there was a new general manager, Brenda Librecz. She twice came to the park and asked to be shown around. We asked her to assign this park a budget of $200,000, and designate the park as a lab for trying things that might work in other neighbourhoods too.  But Ms.Librecz is fantastically busy restructuring her vast department, and although she was friendly, there was no follow-up.

Taxes and a community centre without walls:

Late last winter, when the Friday Night Supper conversations were popping with ideas from so many people, Jutta asked Tino DeCastro, our local Recreation supervisor, whether he would let us see if we could test how much money the park actually needs to run well. Tino had some extra funds from his community centre user fees, and he said yes. Summer staff were hired who were unusually capable, we continued with our best winter staff, and the park got even better.  The staff were able to respond to the heat wave that began on June 5, opening the wading pool for most of June, so that the park became a regional cooling-off centre. Musicians, artists, theatre performers, dancers, fire twirlers, shared the park with soccer, basketball and frisbee. With lots of staff support, park friend  Georgie Donais mobilized five hundred pairs of hands over the whole summer to shape the cob alcove.  The farmers’ market grew bigger again, and people complained that they forgot their groceries because they were so busy talking to their neighbours. The Friday Night Supper line-ups got quicker, even though the hillside around the oven was sometimes covered with people. Because it was so hot and so dry, many families with young children told us they spent the summer living in the park, instead of in their stuffy high-rise apartments where there was no air. Kids dug rivers in the sandpit late into the evening, after dark, while their parents chatted on the benches nearby. Picnics multiplied on weekends, and wonderful smells of many different foods drifted through the park at those times.

The experiment was working so well that Tino let it continue into the rink season. Dufferin Rink sometimes had more people than it could handle, so Tino allowed the Dufferin Rink staff to begin working alongside his rink staff at the other nearby rinks, Wallace and Campbell, that are under his supervision. That allowed rink staff to introduce women’s shinny hockey times, run some kids’ and youth shinny hockey tournaments, make campfires to roast hot dogs, and keep the rinks open longer hours.  

Wallace Rink had a nasty blind alley with a chain link fence that cut off any quick exit from the skating area (with no visibility, no ‘eyes on the park’). Volunteers made a wooden stairway and opened the chain link barrier, so that people could easily go from the rink to the parking lot. Within a day that became the main stairway to the rink, and the rink became safer.

Food and a community centre without walls:

Along with experimenting with the park budget, we tried a new approach to the park food. We put up signs: “if you don’t like these prices, pay what you want. If you want to do some park cleanup for food (especially kids) that’s fine, you can eat with no money.” The food became a medium of exchange for park help – and people who did a lot for the park in summer sometimes found that their money was not accepted even in winter, when they came to the zamboni café.

We treated the food money that came in as a pooling of neighborhood resources, and used it to augment programs, buy groceries, fix broken things. We kept every receipt for what was spent, so we know that we spent another $147,739.17 for the park last year.

The “lab result”:

Our neighborhood experiment, in total, cost  $329,000. But only 55% of that came from our taxes. The other 45% came from people eating good food at the park. For that we got a rich tapestry of community life that would be hard to find in city buildings that cost three times as much to operate.

That was the little experiment that became possible with Tino’s support. Parks and Recreation Director Don Boyle’s reaction when he found out was – “this has to stop.”  That was a shocker! We thought we had done so well, and suddenly we were in the penalty box. Don mystified Jutta by insisting to her that it costs only $250,000 a year in total to run McCormick Community Centre. (He’s not even close – the director of Toronto’s community recreation centres needs to get his details straight.) But in the days following the first response, Don was persuaded (by our City Councillor Adam Giambrone) to moderate his reaction. No one knows what will happen next. Is there support for grass-roots experimentation at Parks, Forestry and Recreation?

Community centres now

A few weeks ago, the Roncesvalles-MacDonell Residents’ Association found out that City Council had cancelled plans for building the Wabash Community Recreation Centre on land the city bought for that purpose, beside Wabash-Sorauren Park (near High Park).  From the association’s web site: “We have waited 15 years for this community centre. Countless volunteer hours have been invested in getting it built. The children of many residents have grown up and missed out on the opportunities afforded by a community centre.”

Some years ago the association started a movement they called “Build Wabash Now.” They did all the right things. They handed out buttons with that slogan. They went to City Council and Committee meetings, they called the councillors, they had fund-raisers, got media contacts, and stood out on Roncesvalles Avenue in the winter cold getting 1,368 signatures from residents. The City bought the land, spent $1.2 million on environmental cleanup, and hired a firm of architects to do a feasibility study. There’s an old factory on the site, and the architects said it could be turned into a community centre for $12 million, or a swimming pool could be added to bring the project to $21 million.

But now it’s become clear that the money is not there. The $12 - $21 million Centre is not near getting built.  Instead, City staff suggested a “clubhouse-style facility” like ours, at an estimated cost of $700,000 to $1.5 million. (Our park’s brick shoe-box cost $300,000 in 1993  - it wasn’t intended to be a clubhouse, but a three-months-of-the-year rink change room).

All that effort, all that money, and all those kids who are already grown without a shovel going into the ground. (One community centre campaigner said she was pregnant when she joined the association – now her daughter is fourteen.)

It’s time for people to talk about small buildings and responsive City staff

Maybe these hard-working folks would like to make common cause with us and with people elsewhere in the city who want to strengthen existing outdoor gathering places in their neighborhood. Small things done now in any neighborhood park can make a start. Before people keel over from years of waiting, they can put in a tetherball, some fast-growing trees, a couple of stump tables for checkers or chess, a dozen or more plain benches, and a fire site. Maybe also a sand pit with a water hose, five or six picnic tables, a few park-issue green platforms where a musician might play, and a little shed – so simple.  If the City adds some grown-up on-site staff who know how to be responsive (more collaboration, less bossing and making rules), each community can collaborate with those city staff to shape the space according to what makes sense in that particular neighbourhood.

This spring we’ll be going visiting around the city, wherever we’re invited. It’s time to talk, about doing small things in parks and also about small buildings.  For more information about small buildings in particular, and for some enjoyable brainstorming, contact Georgie Donais at cob@dufferinpark.ca.

REPORT ON RINK BOARD OF MANAGEMENT MEETING, FEBRUARY 7

The meeting was attended by lots rink users, some Dufferin Rink staff,  City Councillor Adam Giambrone, Parks, Forestry and Recreation director Don Boyle, and 4-5 representatives of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 416. Union Representative Ron Moreau explained to the meeting that no matter who runs the rink, the law requires that they must take over all union agreements with Local 416. Park friend Belinda Cole reported on her research on boards of management. She found out that the City has the power to decide whether or not to set up a board of management.  It is, essentially, a political decision by Council, with a lot of latitude – there is nothing in the law or by-laws which set out any criteria Council should or must consider when it decides whether or not to create a board of management.

Belinda also reported that in 2006, City staff recommended an operating budget of $6 million for the City’s ten existing board of management centres (ranging from $315,000 for Applegrove to  $973,000 for Harbourfront Community Centre to  $1,022,000 for 519 Church Street). Many people at the meeting said they aren’t trying to go against unions but they want the rinks to be better maintained. At the end, six people volunteered to do more research into all aspects of the board of management alternative, including the question of covering the whole park, not only the rink. The results of that next stage will be posted at the rink house in time for the March 3 Friday Night Supper. The community board of management web pages on the park web site have already begun to multiply.

ORGANIC FARMERS’ MARKET EVERY THURSDAY 3 TO 7 P.M.

inside the rink house main room and zamboni garage. We’ve entered the time when the regular summer farmers are allowed to import produce. Most also still have some of their own storage vegetables. In addition, the market also has three local meat vendors (beef, pork, poultry, lamb, venison, elk), Georgian Bay fish, local mushrooms, two bread bakers (counting the park), two sweet-bakers, and many other vendors selling prepared foods and special items (like honey, olives and olive oil, cheese, wildcrafted foods).


NEWSLETTER SPONSORED BY Tere Oulette, the owner of a wonderful toy store called Scooter Girl Toys at 187 Roncesvalles, and a very loyal friend of the park. Tere just sent us postdated cheques to sponsor one print run a month for the whole of 2006. That’s being a park friend for the long haul!