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Notified August 4, posted August 5 at the park
posted August 6, 2004
August 6: Friends of Dufferin Grove Park Sets Fundraising Goal
[Editor, August 11: The Goal was originally set to $17,500. Goal since revised downward to $7,000]
OUR PARK IS BROKE:
Due to some inattentive book-keeping by Jutta, our park has overrun its staffing budget. We're unhappily following the great tradition of surprise book-keeping: the provincial government found out last year that they were $5 billion in the hole; Parks and Recreation found out they were $8 million over budget last December; and we've joined the parade. We just realized that we've spent $10,000 more than we should have spent so far this year, and there's still a month of summer. Desperate measures are needed. The more this park has turned into a community-centre-without walls, the more ingenious we've had to be, to make it work without a community-centre budget. This year the ingenuity wasn't enough. What remedy?
1. In the short run:
We have to collect this overrun from the people who love this park. Here's your chance, folks, to give the park a donation. If 200 people give us $50 each, we'll get out of the hole. If 300 other people give us $25, we'll have enough money to run the park for the rest of the summer.
In the short run: What you can do
The way to let us know that you can help here is donate some money: call the park at 416 392-0913. Or come by the wading pool food cart. Or come to Friday night supper. Or come to the park bread cart at the Thursday Farmers' market, Or e-mail us at info@dufferinpark.ca. Or come by the pizza oven this Sunday or next Tuesday or Wednesday. Or mail us a cheque made out to "Friends of Dufferin Grove Park" c/o 242 Havelock Street Toronto, M6H 3B9. (And ask your friends too, if you like.)
2. In the long run:
We have to see if the Parks Department can recognize our park as a genuine community centre, cheaper to run than an indoor centre, but with just as many people using it, in all seasons except the mud months of March and November. The yearly allocation for staffing this park was $61,000 until recently but we just couldn't manage, and the city manager raised it to $80,000 for this year. (That doesn't count the wages of litter-pickers and grass-cutters, which are considerably higher than the wages of recreation workers.) As a comparison between our park and other places: the budget for staffing and operating the two nearest community recreation centres, Wallace-Emerson and McCormick, is around $1.2 million a year. Kew Gardens, in the Beaches, a showplace park twice the size of ours, which is also very heavily used and also has an outdoor rink, has a budget of somewhere around $450,000. We don't need that much. But we need more than a fifth of that. Otherwise this experiment in making a community centre without walls will fade away again.
Although the Parks and Recreation budget is around $150 million a year, all that money is already firmly allocated to existing arrangements. To fund our park enough that it can continue as a community centre, there will have to be a re-thinking of what a community centre is and why a fitness centre offering mainly registered programs is not equivalent. Then there will have to be some real political choices made on what portion of our tax money that goes into parks as opposed to buildings and registered programs.
In the long run: What you can do
This is your chance, folks, to make the city aware of your views. If you want there to be community centres without walls like this park, call City Councillor Adam Giambrone at 416 392-7012 (e-mail: Councillor_Giambrone@toronto.ca). Or call the Mayor's office, or the city councillor in your area, if you live at a distance. At the same time, call acting Parks and Recreation general manager Brenda Librecz at 416 392-8182 (e-mail blibrecz@toronto.ca). You can also call our park's area manager, James Dann (who has been very helpful and who supports what goes on here), at 416 392-1122 (e-mail jdann@toronto.ca).