The total Parks and Rec reorganization: November 2003 to July 2004

[excerpt from my forthcoming memoir of working as an outsider]

November 14, 2003

Senior management of Parks and Recreation just dropped a bombshell on its employees. They called together all the neighbourhood-based supervisors and local-area managers last Monday, and told them that their jobs were about to be transformed or to disappear. In fact the entire structure of this public-space enterprise is about to change completely.

I was alarmed at the hints I heard about this meeting, so I tried to find out details. But it was tough - the 200-odd management-level staff who were summoned have all been sworn to secrecy. However, rumours have been flying, all the way down to park litter-pickers. Various staff whom I know look very unhappy.

Then today, a brown envelope with no return address was left for me at the rink office in Dufferin Grove Park, marked "confidential." Inside was a paper entitled "Renewing our focus - Moving forward with Structural Change in Parks and Recreation." This, I gather, is the official document unveiled in power-point at the secret meeting.

I took the envelope home and spent the weekend talking to park friends about it. I had a few contacts among management staff, but none of them admitted to leaving the envelope for me. One of them said it could have been anybody. So many staff are unhappy with the proposal and CELOS is known to be a critic of City Hall.

If I’m reading it right, and this change goes through, our 'park friends' group will have to work with 21 different supervisors and 6 managers, where we currently work with three supervisors and one manager.

There is to be a new "Strategic and Business Services Unit" with 22 new people who are called "officers," and who will be the vigilant eyes and ears of senior management.

The proposed restructuring is so thorough that it would likely swamp out the remaining networks of trust and respect among supervisory parks and recreation staff throughout the whole Division. (There are 18 yet-unnamed positions to be eliminated, meaning that any staff openly disagreeing with this revolution right now could find themselves on that list.)

The interesting thing is, the new plan is being launched in the period just when a new Mayor (David Miller) has been elected but before he actually takes office. In other words, when there’s nobody home.

Intentional timing?

November 17, 2003

I wrote a CELOS analysis of the report. But for whom?

I had an idea. Mayor-elect David Miller had announced right after his election that he was setting up an advisory panel to help with the transition. They include two people whom I know a little – former Toronto mayor David Crombie, and Jane Jacobs. I looked up David Crombie’s address in the phone book, and I already know where Jane Jacobs lives. I made up two big envelopes with the CELOS report and a copy of the city’s draft, and wrote a note on the outside of the envelope. “I plan to give this report to the mayor on Monday. Please read it and let the mayor know if you agree that this plan should be suspended until the new council meets.” Last night I drove to both their houses and stuck the envelopes in their mailboxes. I didn’t get up the nerve to knock on their doors, but I crossed my fingers that they would find them in the morning.

This morning I went to City Hall to drop off the mayor’s envelope. He was standing near the front doors, having his picture taken with a broom, the symbol of his campaign. He was surrounded by smiling people, so I gave the envelope to an assistant.

Later on I heard from an acquaintance at City Hall that, before the Monday afternoon meeting of the advisory panel, Jane Jacobs had followed David Miller down the hallway, waving the CELOS restructuring critique and urging him to read it. My source (who also has a copy of my report) overheard Jacobs reading this part aloud to Miller:

"This is a very bad blow for neighbourhoods. In our area, if this change goes through, our very active ‘park friends’ group will have to work with 21 different supervisors and 6 managers. The relationships we slowly built up after the last big upheaval when the megacity was created, will disappear in one stroke."

And the story will be the same for park friends and advisory councils all over the city.

Jacobs told the mayor that the plan was the kind of approach she had been fighting against all her life. My source says that some other councillors are dubious too.

November 19, 2003

Mayor Miller has apparently ordered the restructuring plan to be suspended, until there can be more community and staff input. I’m guessing that most of the upper management staff are angry at this development. After months of meetings, their new plan was ready to go, and now they are to be mired in more meetings.

.........

July 6, 2004

The latest Parks and Recreation restructuring plan was released today, just after city hall had emptied out for the summer holidays. Management certainly followed Mayor Miller’s instruction to consult more. PFR Director Kathy Wiele reported that there were hundreds of returns from a written staff survey, and that about 750 front-line staff took part in consultations.

Over the course of the last round of “stakeholder meetings” in spring, the participants were dunked into a kind of management word soup. A ferry ticket price or a summer camp fee was a consumer product category. Parks and Recreation, the meeting leaders said, needed a transformation, allowing their planners to think big at the top. Staff were going to position themselves to promptly analyze city-wide trends, easily identify costs and implement changes, flexibly place staff and match them to new portfolios, seamlessly accomplish change at the same time as minimizing disorientation and above all, repeated on almost every page, move the division forward. Staff would devote themselves to a dynamic process that requires continuous evaluation and fine tuning.

As the weeks passed, the attendance at the stakeholder meetings gradually diminished. People’s eyes glazed over as the concepts kept on coming. Someone had run a cost-benefit analysis on the city’s trees. “The trees set into Toronto’s streets are worth almost $2 billion....Over a 50 year life span, the average tree makes: $31,250 worth of oxygen; $62,000 worth of air pollution control; recycles $37,500 worth of water; controls $31,250 worth of soil erosion.....:” – followed by, incongruously “More trees can help soothe a neighbourhood locked in strife.”

The general manager of the time, Brenda Librecz, tried to keep the tone informal and upbeat. As the weather warmed up, she came to the meetings in sandals with little pictures painted on her toenails. She said that the mayor had seen them and laughed, despite all his cares. In early June, Ms.Librecz announced that her Division had hired journalist Elaine Dewar to “toughen up” the PFR restructuring proposal and get it ready to present to City Council. Dewar said she would put in some “wows” and ''“big asks” so Council had something to reach forward to.

By the end of June, City Council had the document in hand, and today it was released to the media. Entitled “Our Common Grounds,” it’s enthusiastic about Toronto’s ability to “market” itself to the world: “London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Seoul….These cities are Toronto’s new competitors. They are leaving behind the heavy industry that brought them to world prominence, marketing instead their citizens’ skills and ideas, becoming what economist Richard Florida called Creative Cities….As Council has recognized, that puts Toronto in a great competitive position: cultural diversity and quality of life are Toronto’s best features.”

The report gives a little dash of history lite: “In 1990 there was a hard recession, forcing the City to let go thousands of talented people who’d made Toronto known as New York run by the Swiss, or, the City That Works.….The homeless overflowed from the shelters to the streets. They took up their posts on our splendid boulevards and parks, built tent cities, camped under bridges and in the ravines.”

Was it the thousands of talented City staff, without jobs, who overflowed into the boulevards and pitched their tents in the ravines? The relentless beat of the report doesn’t specify, there is no time for details. Parks and Recreation is in charge of the problem of the inactivity of youth too. If youth don’t get recreation programs to keep them active, society will soon have to pay “billions…. to take care of this inactive echo….It’s not in the common interest to let the future take care of itself. We have to turn the river of the city’s youth in a new direction. But first we have to understand where it’s flowing….We need to offer youth inclusion into something larger than themselves.” The language evokes a military-style youth corps.

And new accommodations will also have to be made for the expected one million seniors by 2021. “Expect bingo operators to take their cue from the movie exhibitors and install luxury seating, good food, and classy cocktail lounges where musicians will perform ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and other golden oldies.” In the end, the report applied equal-opportunity condescension to all age groups: “With high levels of education and a lack of social consensus or shared values, the public is demanding a greater role in decision-making. Protesting change and being part of the ‘public process’ has become a new leisure activity.”

These rather shocking caricatures of citizens float in long lists of “big asks” and “wow” items. The lists are so extensive that they overwhelm any questions about staff restructuring. Game over.

July 15, 2004

After six months of more “community consultations,” the restructuring is going ahead anyway. Since “Our Common Ground” came out, there has been another series of all-encompassing planning reports. All of them involve community meetings, generally sparsely attended, at big round tables, and all of them are visionary. Jane Jacobs said that such a central perspective will give lots of work to planners and managers but undermine local neighbourhoods.

Here we go. But changes rarely happen all at once, and in the case of Dufferin Grove Park, not so much has shifted yet. The Ward 18 City Councillor, Adam Giambrone, has let it be known that he wants continuity of staffing, and so Tino is staying as Recreation supervisor, assigned to regional “Arts and Crafts” but helping to make the park work too. The Parks supervisor is also the same as before. Our resistance means we’re being buffered, for now.