Correspondence

To Kelvin Seow, recreation manager, Toronto/East York, April 15 2010

Hello Kelvin,

Thank you for sending me the responses to my oven questions. Last night I forwarded your e-mail to the oven users who were copied on my original questions, and I got corrections from three people this morning. The corrections are in red, in the attachment called "Kelvin Seow reply."

As a summary, two main concerns:

1. there are important factual differences between the responses in your e-mail and the accounts of the people who actually got the ovens built and use them 2. the process of non-consultative policy development or review by PFR staff, re the ovens, is evidently going on as before, now in its third year: Draft policy.

I think that setting up a meeting a.s.a.p. between the policy reviewers mentioned in your e-mail, and the PFR oven builders/users, would be a good "lab" for the community engagement framework now being explored. To be clear: I think this long overdue working meeting should take place before there is one more minute of the kind of internal review we see in the document you sent me. I hope the general manager will agree.

I've attached two other relevant documents as well. In the "Stonegate chronology" you will see that the latest (Feb 2009) internal oven-policy draft would make community suppers and baking for farmers' markets impossible, and discourage most other oven use. Also the city's flawed follow-up after careful community consultation by Stonegate is hard to defend. In the Alexandra oven letter you'll see that money was wasted because experience was ignored.

Is it time to fix this?

Jutta