One Person’s Parkland is another Person’s Empty Lot

…and other profound comments from our City Councillors

We know serving on City Council is not always a fun job. Hard decisions have to be made and you will never please all of the people all of the time. If your decisions are guided by the City’s strategies, plans, and policies that you and/or your fellow Councillors had a hand in developing and approving, you can easily justify your decision by pointing to those documents.

However, when you come up with your own ideas, and direct Administration to find city-owned land, inlcuding parkland, that aligns with those ideas, you will inevitably run into problems. This holds true anytime you deviate from approved strategies, plans, policies and recommendations. No matter how hard you try, those documents will not support:

• your decision to surplus parkland to allow a developer to build the largest apartment complex in the history of the City on that parkland, outside of the downtown cores, in a car-dependent neighbourhood that’s neither walkable nor transit-friendly;
• your decision to surplus parkland so a developer can build market-rate apartments (aka NOT affordable) using OUR tax dollars;
• your decision to surplus parkland to get a proposed 10% of units at an “affordable housing” rate of max $1620/month, and only for a maximum of TEN years; and
• your decision to surplus parkland instead of doing the hard work of finding a developer to build on a real empty lot like the one shown above. 306 Victoria Ave E, at the corner of Simpson St, is also city-owned. Development on that empty lot not only supports the tenets of the Housing Strategy, the Smart Growth Plan and the Net-Zero Strategy, but it also supports ~$27 million of our tax dollars the City spent revitalizing the dowtown south core, including Simpson St, which is where the Smart Growth Plan states we should be building.

So, instead of defending your decisions to the frustrated and angry residents of Thunder Bay using the sound tenets of the City’s own strategies, plans, and policies, you provide hypocritical, and quite frankly, inappropriate comments and responses such as:

• “…what some people think of as parkland, others see as empty lots.”
• “I want to reassure you that nothing is moving forward on highly used or valued parkland.”
• “I agree that transparency is essential, and any decisions involving public land – especially parks – requires open discussion, public input, and full Council debate. We have been doing this.”
• “…there was clearly no intent to sell off green space that’s valued by the community.”  
• “Let me be the first to say, I respect parks and green space – they’re both very important to me.”
• “Many of these areas are open spaces [where we’re] just mowing the grass, without any formal trails or playground equipment, and we’re spending tax dollars to maintain them.”
• “Would you live on Simpson St?”
• “You can go downtown in any city and find a 20 storey building on a small lot. That’s density. These don’t look very dense to me.”
• “These developments aren’t big and overbearing.”

So please City Council, spare us the meaningless comments, the condescending tone, and the feeble attempt to justify a completely unjustifiable decision. Considering Arundel for development was short-sighted and lacked the type of fulsome community engagement that MUST be done when contemplating selling off community greenspaces (aka “parkland”). Going one step further and declaring it surplus only proves you chose to do what you wanted, and the rest of us be damned.

It’s time to declare you surplus.