City Recreation Plan – Questions for Mayoral Candidates
On October 20th, the City Manager, Beth James, presented the Prince George Community Recreation Services Plan, as well as associated recommendations, to City Council. This plan, if implemented, will likely have a significant impact on both indoor and outdoor public recreation in the City of Prince George, affecting many citizens and even property values.
A key element of the plan is “to move away from a highly distributed model (outdoor recreation in particular) to a more consolidated model” that, through a consultation process, will “consolidate use and reduce the number of small, underutilized facilities such as certain neighbourhood playgrounds, tennis and basketball courts and ball diamonds” throughout the city.
Such a closing down or consolidation of what the plan terms “underutilized” public recreation facilities will likely mean that some neighborhoods will lose out in terms of access to playgrounds and other recreation facilities, as well as possible reduction in housing property value as a result.
According to the plan, the reason given for all of this is to ensure long term sustainability. In effect, it is claiming that city outdoor recreation facilities are currently too widely distributed throughout the city and city resources are “at capacity for maintaining and supporting the current delivery.”
However, it should be noted that while this plan of the city administration appears to be going in one direction, the promises of the two mayoral candidates appear to be going in an opposite and contradictory direction.
For example, Lyn Hall has made a key plank of his program to “re-connect” City Hall with the citizens of Prince George, even going so far as to holding council meetings in outlying neighborhoods. But the question must be asked, how can there be a true reconnection if these same neighborhoods are, at the same time, being disconnected from existing playgrounds and sports sites through closures by City Hall? The logic seems inconsistent.
For his part, Don Zurowski has pledged to increase the city’s population by 20% from 80,000 to 100,000. If that is the case, why would the city administration be closing down playgrounds and sports sites? To increase the population by that amount should mean, at the very least, holding onto existing recreation facilities or perhaps even creating more. With its recreation plan, is the city administration, in effect, doubting his claim about population increase?
There appears to be contradictions between what the two mayoral candidates are pledging and where the City administration is aiming to go in terms of the city’s recreation facilities.
How can these contradictions be reconciled? It would be nice to get some clarification from the candidates, and maybe the City Manager should answer a question or two.
Peter Ewart is a columnist and writer based in Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca
Comments
I haven’t studied this issue to any great extent but I can see the upside of such a policy; both from a facility user perspective and a financial perspective. I had friends who moved to Edmonton a few years ago who were lamenting the lack of centralized soccer fields such as we have in PG and they were struggling to get all over town to keep their three kids active in soccer. We have built a wonderful community of soccer families gathering in one location each Saturday in soccer season. The same can be said of the gatherings at Ft. George Park and Duchess playgrounds. The financial benefits seem obvious. Fewer but quality facilities with decreased maintenance costs over the other model. Don’t see the downside unless we prefer our little used enclaves in isolation.
I have always felt that city council is the public face to the city administration. City council does not really make the decisions. City council is informed of what the city planners are wanting to do. i think the decision makers in city hall need to be replaced with some new people and fresh ideas.
I think Peter just called it. There is a total disconnect between administration and city council. I suspect it has been there for a long time. Unfortunately our current mayor has not helped the situation by fracturing council.
A unified council could sort this out fairly quickly but they have to work together. The recreation plan disconnect is a symptom of a bigger problem. A mayor can’t sort this out on their own. We have seen what happens when a mayor tries to take over. Council fights back it might take time to reorganize but they do eventual fight back, as we have just seen in the last year and a bit.
I believe there are quite a few parks that are barely used by people and should be closed. As for Zurowski and his crazy idea of increasing the population of PG to 100,000 is ridiculous. Not saying our road system couldn’t handle it, and we’ll soon find that out once the winter games are here, but our aging underground infrastructure is just one problem that may not be able to handle 100,000. The second problem is the amount of time Zurowski has. I’m sure he realizes that can’t be done in 4 years. Let’s not make PG an expensive place to raise a family, right now it is one of the lowest in BC and an increase in population can mean an increase in taxes to cover the costs of old infrastructure because it isn’t meeting the demands any longer. An increase in population would also increase many other things…
City Transit will increase because it’ll need to serve more routes and the need for more buses. Police and fire departments would need a funding increase to serve that extra 20,000 people and we already need our fire department buildings to be updated. New schools would have to be built and heaven forbid we close old schools to make room for new ones because the old ones are too small and outdated. Intersections on roadways would have to be updated to allow more traffic that would mean an update to traffic signals, lane changes, and even road design changes. We already spent $900,000 on 4th Ave conversion. Now for parks, Fort George Park would have to be expanded just to accommodate 3,000 more vehicles during its major events.
I mean most of these would turn into projects for jobs around PG and in turn it would pay off eventually but it’ll take 4 years to plan just a part of this. Zurowski thinks it’s easy and it sure as hell doesn’t sound easy. Good luck.
It would be quite easy for our parks and playgrounds to be sponsored buy those same businesses who find greater reward hopping on the media hyped cause-du-jour.
It is easier and a more effective method of achieving a healthy society, if everyone is active and kids are receiving exercise. Rather than donning colourful t-shirts and marching around for a few hours once a year.
I seem to recall not too long ago an extensive public consultation process to put the Recreation plan together. There were many public meetings advertised, stakeholder meetings held and I even saw City staff at various events around town gathering opinions and feedback on this plan. I took the opportunity to go to one of these meetings and I clearly heard from the public in attendance many of the ideas that are being proposed in this document.
Based on this I ask the questions…..Is this plan really that far our of touch if it represents the feedback from the community?. Does the opinion, or plans, of mayoral candidates matter more than what the public brought forward?
What’s the point of having public consultations if the information and ideas gathered won’t be supported by Council?
I hear folks on here all the time complaining that public feedback isn’t listened to. In this case it appears people are willing to over rule what was heard from the public as it may not agree with their own personal opinion….you can’t have your cake and eat it too!
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