Community Gardens

From Laura Berman: why service contracts with the city would be tricky

There is no real equality when working with PFR on a community project. They make it clear that they are in charge and that everyone should accept that. If that is challenged they can become very difficult to work with as I experienced in the early 2000’s. We tried to divide up the work between our group and PFR in a way that made sense, and everyone agreed, but then city staff would make unilateral decisions anyway, with no thought about us, their ‘partners’.

When invited to participate in a community garden advisory group years ago, we had two meetings before it became apparent that City staff had already made up their own minds about how things should be done. We spent those two meetings in ‘meeting speak’ setting out our ‘terms of reference’ (a useless endeavour), rather than really talking about what we were there to talk about. It became clear that they didn’t want our advice and experience and we never met again.

PFR is too centralized. There’s not much real investment by workers in particular parks, no sense of belonging to the community. Added to that is that there’s astonishingly little communication between Parks staff and Recreation staff. They seem to almost be at odds with each other and at times seem to find it as difficult to work with each other as it is for us to work with them. And toward the community, there’s very much a culture of ‘us vs. them’ among Parks staff (not sure if it’s the same in Forestry and Recreation). One gets the sense that they’d rather we just go away and not mess up their park.

Drawing up a contract in order to work with PFR would make sense but that process in itself could be fraught with challenges. For example there are no guarantees that the PFR staff would honour the terms of the contract. Whoever works on that contract has to have a great deal of patience and a thorough understanding of the inner workings of the department. Most importantly the follow-up has to have some real teeth to enforce the terms. The PFR organizational system is too complex and Byzantine to navigate. And there’s a real reluctance to tell you what you need to know in order to navigate the maze. The advice leads you back to the beginning or to dead ends (often and many). When trying to start or get help with a community project there’s no clear destination to who might help—or too many destinations that don’t want to or that know how to cooperate.

Even explicit direction from the policy level does not necessarily translate to the actuality on the ground, unless things have changed very much since my experiences (which I doubt). Policy decisions made at upper levels often are not backed up with resources and with the real desire to make them happen. Rather than trying something, upper management and city councilors just send it down the organizational chute without any real understanding of how things work. Things bog down at the mid-managerial level, with staff who feel they have their hands full trying to just maintain ‘their’ parks without having to help ‘regular people’. When there is a staff person assigned to be a contact for community projects city-wide (I’m thinking of community gardens) that person is not given a flying squad with dedicated resources and staff. Instead he has to navigate the District maze and seek cooperation from the managers. Some managers are willing but most are not—or at least not in any timely fashion. I see this as a real challenge to setting up a conservancy or other form.