Rink clubhouse correspondence/posters

Feb.21, 2024 to City Councillors Malik, Fletcher, Bravo, and Saxe, from Jutta Mason

Dear Councillor

This is a request to meet with you for one hour, within the next month, to discuss two issues relating to the Parks, Forestry and Recreation division. First, we would like to follow up on our “outdoor rinks clubhouse” proposal, which was delivered to your office at the end of January – to pilot at 4 of the city’s 54 outdoor rinks. Secondly, we would like to brief you on our long experience working together or untogether with all levels of PFR city staff, and collecting stories from many park friends.

Our interests have been and are now:  Increasing the good uses of parks and public spaces  Reducing frustration among people who use those spaces  Supporting wise public spending on those spaces

This coming Monday we will send you a detailed sampling of practical (and sometimes urgent) improvements that can be addressed now. We hope that this briefing can help you, and your three council colleagues, to amplify your understanding of the problems that the new general manager of PFR will face. PFR is in some trouble, and the new GM will need energetic guidance and direction from council.

Meeting with each of you individually, for ease of fitting this hour into your schedules, would work for us. We look forward to the conversations.

sample poster (Campbell rink)

Feb.26, 2024 (never sent)

Dear Councillor Malik,

This follow-up letter is to give you a more detailed sampling of the larger Parks and Recreation issues we hope to raise with you at the meeting we’re requesting.

We’ve also included a copy of the 2023 report we published about the state of the city’s 54 outdoor rinks. And – in reference to our “rink clubhouse” proposals –what’s needed in a “rink clubhouse” is: lighting, windows, a long table, a small kitchen (a hub kitchen or a warming kitchen), a window counter, a Pro-shop (pucks, tape, laces etc.), skate rentals, and a community bulletin board. Included here is a detailed list of the specific changes we recommend for Harry Gairey rink so that city staff could, at your request, use this information to give you their cost estimate.

WHO WE ARE

In 1986 a small group of mothers tried something: working with city staff to make the city’s first one-day-a-week “indoor park” at the Wallace-Emerson CRC gym. It became very lively. In summer 1993 some of us joined with a few of our Dufferin Grove Park neighbours to try out an open-air “adventure playground” there. The following winter we got involved with Dufferin “AIR” Rink, then we turned to gardens, food, and music/theatre. Our interest, then as now, was supporting sociability in public spaces.

Our group incorporated as a local public space “practical research” organization (CELOS) in 2005, and added two more nearby city outdoor rinks to our research cluster: Wallace Rink and Campbell Rink. In 2009 we became a registered charity, and began following up on community research invitations from other parts of the city. Urbanist Jane Jacobs, and former mayors David Crombie, John Sewell, and Barbara Hall were fans. David Miller was not. The previous two general managers of Parks and Rec were not.

We had a long-running and sometimes fruitful conversation/argument, that went on for years, with city management and local councillors. Then in 2003 a radical restructuring of Parks and Rec began citywide, and the conversation started to dry up. In 2010 the supportive Rec supervisor was removed. Rec staff involved with us in the social programs were warned that they were “in conflict of interest.” It took about 10 more years for the former partnership between CELOS and Parks and Rec to stop completely. Citywide public health lockdowns began in March 2020 and some public space prohibitions were not removed until late in 2022. Now, in February 2024, CELOS offers an assessment of current Parks and Recreation practice with which we are familiar.

The summary: we believe this city division is in trouble and needs fixing/work in many of its parts. We particularly want to raise the issues of (1) communication, (2) staffing, (3) permits, (4) partnerships, and (5) costs (both operating and capital). Here we give two winter examples of what’s not working in PFR: communication and staffing. We also offer some practical steps to begin a turnaround. This is an invitation to talk.

A. COMMUNICATION

1. The example of outdoor rinks: Toronto is the world capital of mechanically-cooled outdoor rinks, but they are not working nearly as well as they could be.

-- In 2004, then-mayor David Miller introduced the central 311 information system that he admired on a visit to Baltimore. But 311 doesn’t work for city outdoor rinks. Skaters report that they are frustrated by information that is often wrong or too general, usually only “Closed because of ice conditions.” Time to bring the phone lines back.

-- when schools find out the teachers can bring classes to the rinks, especially if there’s skate rental and a cup of hot chocolate, kids fill up the rinks in the daytime. But there’s very little outreach to schools by rink staff – nobody has that job, including rink staff who have many hours of downtime during their shifts when they could be contacting schools.

-- Rink literacy is too low for the public, for PFR management, and for councillors. The rinks are a complicated winter treasure, and the more that people know about how ice is made and kept, the less they’ll be frustrated when skating is interrupted. At the moment, when something goes wrong, it’s almost treated as a secret.

2. What’s the big secret? Communication among staff is so hierarchical that management has too little interaction with the day to day of the hands-on staff. If there are staff conflicts, staff are discouraged from talking to each other to work it out, told instead to go up the line. Management does not share important operating or budget issues with hands-on staff. Non-staff, including city councillors, are required to go through FOI for basic information, e.g. staff costs, partnership contracts, capital project details. Non-disclosure is the norm instead of the exception, and it’s one of the first trainings given to hands-on staff. This is why rink literacy and broad budget literacy remain so low.

3. Low value given to experience over rank: If hands-on staff have information based on their experience, the message is often blocked by their low status. An example of this from 10 years back: the city was then trying to work out a uniform citywide outdoor bake-oven policy. After not consulting with hands-on rec staff who used the ovens during the two years of management meetings about these ovens, management presented their proposed new policy to the Council committee. Some hands-on recreation staff bakers attended the meeting. That’s allowed, but they’re not allowed to speak. The most experienced and credentialed rec staff baker from Dufferin Grove Park was unaware of this, and very politely tried to present some necessary oven program considerations. The then-general-manager of PFR whispered in the committee chair’s ear, and he interrupted her deputation. He said she must stop talking immediately, and that to even try to tell what she knew was a kind of fraud. So she went back to her seat, silenced, the councillors went on to other business, and the new oven policy was soon voted in by Council – with the effect that most park wood-fired ovens get very limited use to this day.

B. STAFFING

1. Overstaffing of recreation staff at the base: The 54 outdoor rinks (speaking only of our winter example) are overstaffed with mainly, often only, young people who spend many hours sitting around. Their job descriptions focus on checking for helmets or for domestic violence or racism or the misuse of dangerous chemicals. They have mandated breaks from their inactivity: 20 minutes (paid) and an hour (unpaid) after more than four scheduled hours. If the weather requires closing down, they stay at the closed rink for their shift as booked, doing what’s described as “customer service,” i.e. telling skaters that the rink is closed. On the other hand, if a rink is very busy and a shift ends, recreation staff are not paid for staying extra time and helping unless specifically directed to do so by the next level up. Boredom is so acute that staff miss a lot of days or quit.

2. Inflexible pay codes, and therefore no mentoring. All the hands-on rink staff are paid between $16 and $17.50 an hour, no matter what their experience is or the work they find needs doing. Management says this inflexibility is because the union contract requires it. There is no properly-waged job category for daily onsite mentoring, despite the youth and high turnover of most location staff. The next level up, at more than twice the hourly wage, is the “community recreation programmer (CRP),” who operates as basically an admin assistant for the supervisors, and whose work is mostly onscreen and in meetings.

3. A “safety” mandate that’s too broad: Booking so many near-minimum-wage staff for each shift is intended to relate to staff safety, so that if a problem arises, staff can help each other. But often both or all three or even four location staff have too little experience or maturity among them to manage a serious problem.

4. Increasing amounts of online “staff training” as a substitute for ongoing mentoring. The educational benefits of requiring 8 -12 training modules, many requiring refreshment every two years, are dubious and unproven. Experienced staff are treated the same as new 14-year-old hires, in the training sessions required. Staff are “de-scheduled” on the basis of whether their training modules have not been completed, or recompleted, or recompleted (etc.) Booking such sessions can become so complicated that new or returning staff may have to wait for months to work – another reason for staff shortages alternating with over-staffing.

Where to go from here:

1. For staff: open the conversation to all staff. Any level of staff person can call a meeting about a work-related issue and lead it, and invite whomever they please. That includes inviting councillors, and also non-staff (i.e. open meetings, no closed doors).

2. For community: let PFR staff know that they can lean in the direction of “disclosure agreements” to replace most current FOI applications. See if more helpful conversations happen when there are far fewer secrets.

CELOS wintertime rink clubhouse project

(sent around in winter 2023/2024)

We have been poking away at broadening the social life of city parks for a long time, and we’re not quite done yet.

We've begun talking about a partnership project with the working title "rink clubhouse." We have a chance to involve three city councillors, plus building on park-friends contacts in different parts of the city that we’ve gained over the years. Our project will only happen if the partnership is of a new kind – including active mentoring of individual local rink staff by experienced front-line parks and rec staff, over the whole season. This would be supported but not led by management staff, with a focus on five or six local outdoor rinks for starters.

Why should we do it? Dufferin Grove clubhouse (when it finally opens) has been replaced by a building that is designed for charging fees – for use of the industrial kitchen, for after-school and summer camps, for renting out for birthday parties and meetings. The cost of the “Northwest Corner Revitalization” reno, including the new ice surface, is around $8 million. The era of the simple, friendly, no-fee community clubhouse is over at Dufferin Grove.

What do we want to do? The city has 54 outdoor rinks, almost all of them with small, plain but solid, under-used buildings: potential no-fee social spaces for their varying neighbourhoods. For a few thousand dollars of city “minor capital” funds, almost any of them could be turned into a place where neighbours can run into each other, sit and talk and be warm before or after skating or while they keep an eye on their kids (through the window), maybe have a coffee or a bowl of soup, rent some skates – much like what used to happen at Dufferin Rink. The buildings can be modified, but only good rink staff can make this work.

We have a little working crew that could show how existing rink houses could become neighbourhood clubhouses, starting with a few rinks.

Who we have: - a recent Masters graduate of the Waterloo School of Architecture, working on designing simple, cheap fixes for rink change rooms in neighbourhoods that want them as clubhouses - some smart, experienced part-time city staff who are used to making the three former rink clubhouses (Dufferin, Wallace, Campbell) work well - a former Dufferin Grove clubhouse soup chef - a savvy unhoused park camper who has taught us a lot about how skillfully people can help each other when housing is lacking - an older lady (me) with experience with the city bureaucracy and with introducing good people

What we need: - some city councillors who want to try a rink clubhouse in their ward (talks have begun, more have to follow) - management staff from Recreation and also Parks who seriously want to help their rinks get better -- and make better use of the city’s “partnership office” too - other city staff who want to be involved in building on the resources that are already there, and in opening doors into each others’ silos (e.g. the “Visitor Economy” office?) - rink users who want a clubhouse so they can get warm and exchange neighbourhood news - lonely people who want to find out where all the people have gone - new arrivals in the city who want to try skating and making friends with winter

Want to get involved? mail@celos.ca