posted August 20, 2007

Dufferin Grove Park

CLEANING OUT OUR OWN PANTRY, MAKING DO WITH WHAT WE HAVE

Every park has to help reduce the operating costs while the City tries to dig itself out of its deepening fiscal hole. Here are some immediate suggestions for Dufferin Grove Park, based on talking with on-site staff and park users.

1. Put the $250,000 wading pool rebuilding on hold. That’s a capital cost, but since the money for such capital projects is entirely from borrowing, there will be interest, charged to the operating budget. (And a City that’s $2 billion in debt should suspend borrowing more, maybe…)The wading pool still works fine except for the antiquated system for turning the water on and off, which can be fixed by some skilful plumbers.
2. Reassign the extra two staff who drive into the park every night and lock the field house washrooms. On-site recreation staff can resume locking the washrooms as they have for years, helped out by volunteers.
3. Cut grass cutting by half. This will free up maintenance workers for other tasks (like fixing missing bench slats and helping with tree watering) and save on fuel as well. No need to run the big diesel mowers during the dry days of summer, even if a few hardy grasses pop up to sway in the hot breezes.
4. Free up existing Parks by-law workers to deal with dog problems and other major issues. They can focus on bigger problems by collaborating more closely with Parks maintenance staff and Recreation program staff, who can deal with the little annoyances in the day to day. At the moment, there’s so much specialization of function that by-law officers often operate without direct communication with on-site staff. This has sometimes caused confusion and the need for extensive bureaucratic damage control – costing extra hours for a lot of people.
5. For winter: fit the rink season more to the angle of the sun (open earlier and close earlier), to reduce energy costs for keeping the rink frozen, and at the same time to reduce ice repair time for the workers (the high sun of March makes ice maintenance much more time-and-energy-consuming than the low sun of November).
6. Encourage park workers (maintenance and program workers, supervisors) to use bikes or the TTC to go between parks when possible, saving fuel and repair costs for City vehicles.
7. Reduce paperwork by letting Recreation staff resume doing programming without having to clear every detail with two other branches (Permits and Parks maintenance). The amount of internal paperwork even for long-established programs, in the new centralized departmental structure, takes a lot of extra staff time at every level.

In the mid-August print run of this newsletter, we’ll have some larger recommendations for the Department as a whole, with more details about money that can be saved. Park users, this is your chance to shine: add your suggestions and either tell them to on-site Recreation staff or email them to: budget@dufferinpark.ca.