Energy Retrofit excerpts from the Dufferin Grove Park newsletter

August 2007, HOW TO CUT COSTS AND STILL HAVE FUN

When Mayor Miller raised the alarm, City managers decided that one way to save money was by cutting the hours of Parks and Recreation part-time workers. Community centres are to be closed on Mondays; outdoor ice rinks are to stay locked until January; golf courses will close a week early; and the cleanup workers will disappear from the parks well before the leaves fall.

There are some puzzling things here. For example: community centres also make money, by charging fees for daycare or weight rooms or swimming lessons. Laying off the part-time program staff will save on wages but will also mean lost fees (and full-time staff will have to be paid whether the centres are open or not). As for keeping outdoor ice rinks closed until January: these rinks use less energy during the low-sun months of November and December. Not opening them until the days are starting to lengthen means higher energy costs. (Earlier opening and earlier closing would make more financial sense). In addition, the City has just spent $10.3 million doing energy retrofits on all the outdoor rinks and some of the indoor ones. And according to the capital projects list on the City’s website, $4.089 million was just spent doing repairs and replacements of outdoor rinks citywide last year. In this neighbourhood, for example, Wallace Emerson just got a new rink for $1.1million, and Dufferin Rink got new pipes for $200,000 this spring. Does it really make sense to board up the house after you just renovated?

It’s possible that the outdoor rinks have been selected because the energy retrofit program is unusual. It was done on the assumption that if the City borrowed the $10.3 million to put in weather-stripping, pipes-insulation and computer controls for the ice-making plants, the energy savings would be so high that the retrofit work would in effect pay for itself. The money saved on utility bills would be used to pay off the loan. However there was no reliable baseline of previous energy costs, and now, as utility costs keep going up anyway, Parks Forestry and Recreation must pay high utility bills and the borrowed money – at the rate of $1.3 million a year (for the next ten years). What’s unusual is that the money must come out of the operating budget, which is also meant to staff the rinks. It may be that Parks management is a little doubtful about the “deemed savings” forecast for this project (without an energy baseline, who can tell if the City got value for money?). However one sure way to reduce energy costs is not to run the rinks.

There must be better ways to save money than these citywide closures. One suggestion: save money on payroll. Since management staff are the highest paid, they can set the good example. If each of the 226 management staff of Parks, Forestry and Recreation worked one four-day-week a month, expenditures would go down nearly $1.5 million (yes, “Rae days” for management). That’s a start! And there are other good possibilities, long-term solutions to a problem that won’t go away even with new taxes. This needs well-informed public discussion! CELOS is putting together its Parks, Forestry and Recreation budget report for citizens, so everyone can help with solutions. Fact-checking has been tricky since questions often take a long time to get responses. But the report’s first version is almost ready – watch for it at the park or on the web site. It will make lively reading, and hopefully, lively discussion too.

September 2005, CITY SECRETS: CLEANING OUT THE CUPBOARD

It’s a puzzle, how a yearly Parks and Recreation budget of $210 million (more this year) can leave so many things undone in city parks. Two years ago, our small research group (CELOS, stands for: CEntre for LOcal research into public Space) began trying to learn about where the money goes. We didn’t get many answers from City staff, so we started handing in Freedom of Information applications to the City’s Corporate Access and Information Office. Often there was no response within the 60-day limit, or we were refused access to the information, so that we had to appeal to the '''provincial information and privacy commissioner, Ann Cavoukian'''. Recently, Dr. Cavoukian ordered the City to release information requested by the CBC, and she said that in general City of Toronto staff are far too secretive about letting citizens know what is done with their taxes. We agree.

Over time, though, we have begun to unravel some puzzles and are getting closer with others. We found out that when the City pulled out playground equipment all over the City for safety reasons, $4,941,590 was apparently spent on repairs and replacements, but there are '''no records''' of how that money was spent. (The City sent two lawyers and three senior staff to a provincial Freedom of Information hearing to prove that no records of the City’s playground safety project spending exist, so they can’t be made to produce them.)

We found out that for the past 25 years, the City’s Claims Division could find only seven playground injury claims in twenty-five years, costing the City of Toronto a total of $35,033. In response, our park playgrounds were drastically dumbed down, at a cost of at least $5.9 million.

We found out that the City paid out total insurance premiums of '''$10.06 million''' from 1998 to 2003 to cover legal claims. But the City’s deductible is so high (now $5 million) that while the City settled $44.9 million in claims and lawsuits from 1998 to 2003 (for all claims, not only third-party liability), the insurers were on the hook for only $210,450 of that. In recent years, the premium payout was around $1.8 million a year and the insurers paid out NIL. (Nice work if you can get it.)

There’s a saying, “the devil is in the details.” On a small scale, we found out that Parks and Recreation seems to have paid about $600 per site for playground arsenic tests that take 20 minutes of pre-lab labour (i.e. put some sand in three test tubes).  On a larger scale, the City has apparently borrowed $10.3 million to hire a giant American energy retrofit company (Cinergy) to increase the energy efficiency of city rinks, including our park rink. The projected lowering in energy costs will be charged to the Parks and Recreation operating budget so that the loan can be quickly repaid. But the City’s information on existing energy costs seems to be astonishingly incomplete. It’s hard to know how results can be measured without any reliable baseline, but it’s certain that there will be an obligation to pay back over a million dollars yearly from the money that’s meant to run parks and community centres.

And on an even larger scale, the allocation of Parks and Recreation capital funds is very puzzling and we’re working hard to sort through the information we’ve gathered.  More details can be found on the park web site, click on research

This “cleaning out of the cupboard” is meant to reduce the secrecy about how money is spent by the Parks and Recreation Division. We want an ongoing, informed, thoughtful public discussion about our parks and recreation centres. Mayor David Miller says he supports this kind of openness and public participation. So we have strong hopes that all our research efforts will contribute to his resolve. (More in the October newsletter.)

October 2005, RINK CHANGES: SOME BAD NEWS THAT HAS TO CHANGE

Almost every year since amalgamation (1998), rink users have had to stop the City from delaying the rink opening. Last year was an exception, but this year it’s starting again. It seems that the City wants to open our rink a week later than last year. We thought we had finally persuaded the City to settle on opening the first batch of rinks on the last Saturday of November, but now we’ve been told that two rinks only (city-wide) will open on December 3, and the rest not until December 10.

A bit of history: Toronto is rich in outdoor artificial ice rinks – we have 51, spread throughout our neighbourhoods. During the 1980’s, when there were a lot of experienced rink operating staff in the city, these outdoor rinks usually opened shortly after the middle of November and closed on the last weekend in February. Those dates work the best because the big enemy of an outdoor rink is not mild temperatures but the angle of the sun.  The sun is weakest from November to February. By March, even if it’s below zero, a sunny day will turn a rink to mush.

Beginning at the end of the 1980s, there were so many reorganizations of city staff that there were new people in charge of rinks every few years. Many were unfamiliar with running rinks, and they had to learn from scratch, again and again. For the few experienced rink staff remaining, and rink users with a memory, this has been utterly frustrating. And here we go again –- new management, another learning curve, another rink user campaign needed to remind city staff about the best ways to run the rinks. (How long, Lord?)

The myth of “no money”: three years ago the city toyed with the idea of not opening rinks until just before Christmas. That was to save money. What a numbers game: 51 neighbourhood rinks

worth a million dollars each, 5 months of cold weather, '''3 months of low or no sun, but only 10 weeks a year''' for people to have the enjoyment of the rinks. Many people from this neighborhood got in touch with their friends all over the city, and e-mails flooded City Hall. The rinks opened earlier.

It’s good that City staff and Councillors listened, but creating problems and then backing off from irate citizens is not a viable way to govern.

When city staff say they can’t open the rinks because they have no money, we say: we have some suggestions. Redirect your spending. Our little research group, CELOS, has been looking into where the Parks, Forestry and Recreation annual budget of $210-plus million goes. (Doing this research is like pulling teeth, there are so many secrets.)

One place is consultants’ fees: too much money seems to go into buying advice from consultants. Detailed information about consulting contracts is supposed to be public but most of it is hidden. Still, with some digging it’s possible to find some of these contracts.

Example One: It appears that a consultant (an architect) was paid $2000 to help pick out the new rubber flooring for Dufferin Rink House, and then to design a pattern of laying the tiles. There were four similar products to pick from, and the tile pattern is: gray in the middle, blue around the outside. $2000 can be used to buy that kind of advice or, preferably, to run the rink an extra week. ''' Example Two: In 2001, the city paid WGA Wong Gregerson Architects $392,448''' to tell the city what needs to be fixed in “recreational and cultural facilities.” In 2004, the city gave Accent Building Sciences a contract for $803,000

to give more city-wide advice on the same issue. At Dufferin Rink, the consultant recommended, for this year, fixing broken hockey boards ($19,000for twenty or so new pieces of plywood and a paint job, routinely done every year anyway), putting in the new rubber changeroom tiles (we noticed ourselves that the old ones were in shreds; new tiles $15,000), replacing a compressor in the mechanical room ($105,000, but a visit from the compressor company established that our existing compressor is still fine), and fixing a gate that was twisted by a zamboni bang (the zamboni operator and the rink guards had reported it since it was obvious that the gate was hard to close). Along with several other assorted items including a $13,000 “contingency” amount (?), those jobs are listed at $190,000 in the budget. Question: which of these problems could have been addressed by city staff without the consultants?

Example Three: last December the City hired a very large American company, “Cinergy Solutions,” to help “retrofit” all the rinks and arenas so they would be more energy-efficient. The contract is for $10.3 million, all borrowed money. Two years from now, Parks and Recreation will have to begin paying back this loan, with interest, from its operating funds (operating funds are the money for staff, zambonis, etc.). Over $1 million a year has to come out of Park (and rink) operating funds. The contract says that no money will really be lost because the company guarantees that the city will be saving an equal or greater amount from its reduced energy costs. But the baseline energy cost chart, for comparison after the retrofit work is done, seems very dubious. And so far the actual methods of the energy retrofit are a mystery (i.e. the company says that actual descriptions of the work are a trade secret, and so the City’s Freedom of Information office wrote to us: “access denied.”) Question:  Can rink staff and rink users work together with city technical staff and help to meet Kyoto targets without $10 million of mystery engineering?

Our CELOS researchers met with the new '''Parks Forestry and Recreation general manager, Brenda Librecz''', in September (she took the trouble of coming out to the park personally, although unwell). She is perhaps a little taken aback that outsiders like us are getting so involved in the city staff’s business. But we think it’s high time. Park friends who want to champion city parks (and all that’s in them, in this case the rinks) can help:

call our new general manager’s office (416 392-8207, e-mail blibrecz@toronto.ca or the mayor’s office (416 397-2489, e-mail mayor_miller@toronto.ca.

Let them know we want to work with them to help them spend their budgets sensibly, and let them know that cutting the rink season is a false economy.

OUR TAXES: Parks and Recreation staff will often say that the millions spent on major projects (and the consultants hired to carry them out) come from a different pocket than operating funds that are used, for instance, to run the rinks. In the end, though, all the money the city takes in taxes comes from the same pocket – ours. Taxes are a pool of money intended for the good of us all. City staff are there to help us make the most of this pool – that’s their job, even if they don’t always remember it. In this huge city, their days are often chaotic and it’s hard to for them to keep their focus. Park friends can help remind city staff of what’s needed – we need to remind them to 1. talk to us, and 2. Collaborate!