"New era": Vancouver City Council approves process to axe Park Board | Daily Hive

"A new era": Vancouver City Council approves process to axe Park Board

Vancouver Park Board | Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive

Along party lines, in an 8-3 vote, Vancouver City Council has approved Mayor Ken Sim’s member motion to initiate the formal process to abolish the Vancouver Park Board.

All ABC Vancouver councillors voted in favour during the public meeting on Wednesday evening, with OneCity councillor Christine Boyle and Green councillors Adriane Carr and Pete Fry in opposition. This comes just a full week after the Sim first announced his proposal.

Sim’s motion triggered the City of Vancouver to make a formal request to the Government of British Columbia to change the Vancouver Charter to not require the municipal government to have a separately elected body to oversee the parks and recreation system.

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The final decision now lies with Premier David Eby’s administration. Sim previously told Daily Hive Urbanized he has been in discussions with the provincial government on various Vancouver Charter changes, including the abolition of the Park Board. Sim estimates the legislation changes could be made in about six months.

The Park Board’s responsibilities would then be transferred to the Mayor and City Council for governance and to City departments for operations. A working group would also be created to facilitate the “smooth” transition.

The approved motion also asks the provincial government to establish new protections that require a unanimous decision of City Council to change any parkland use, including the sale of parklands. This would then trigger a public referendum for the final decision.

But as written in Sim’s original motion, such protections would only be applied to public parks that are “permanent” in designation. Ahead of the decision, there was speculation and concern over future parkland decisions in the scenario without the Park Board, given that a significant proportion of the City’s parklands are technically deemed to be “temporary,” including popular longtime destinations such as Spanish Banks Beach and Sunset Beach Park.

To help address such concerns, City Council approved an amendment by ABC councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung to direct City staff to accelerate the transition of “temporary” parks to “permanent” status. It was emphasized by City Manager Paul Mochrie that only City Council, not the Park Board, has this transition authority.

The ABC majority voted against amendments proposed by opposition councillors relating to First Nations consultation and the requirement for a public referendum on the Park Board’s abolition before the 2026 civic election. The Mayor noted that the three First Nations of Vancouver have been consulted, with the Musqueam First Nation already endorsing the abolition strategy.

“This is definitely a step in the right direction,” said Musqueam Chief Wayne Sparrow.

“Having a single department with authority for parkland in the City will benefit everyone, including the Musqueam Indian Band. As a local nation with many levels of formal and informal interaction with the City, the proposed streamlined structure will provide clarity and a single point of contact for engaging with the City on the issues that matter most to our people.”

If the Park Board’s abolition is approved by the provincial government, this would be one of the most consequential changes to the governance system of the municipal government since Vancouver’s incorporation in 1886.

The Park Board was created in 1888 to oversee Stanley Park before the incremental expansion of its mandate to its present-day jurisdiction and responsibilities spanning 250 public parks and beaches, the VanDusen Botanical Garden, the Bloedel Conservatory, six golf courses, and 24 community and recreational centres, including facilities with swimming pools, ice rinks, and fitness gyms.

Sim’s bold but highly controversial move came at a steep political price, with the ABC party losing its majority in the Park Board.

Scott Jensen, Laura Christensen, and Brennan Bastyovanszky have indicated they will sit as independents for the remainder of their term and side with Green Party commissioner Tom Digby on more decisions; Marie-Claire Howard, Angela Haer, and Jas Virdi are ABC’s remaining commissioners. Over the past week, since Sim first announced his proposal, the former ABC commissioners have been highly vocal in their opposition to the Mayor’s plan.

The Mayor’s proposal came as a surprise to individuals both inside and outside his political circle. Sim initially pitched the idea of abolishing the Park Board in 2021, but by early 2022, when the ABC party was formed, he pivoted to an effort to fix the Park Board from within by fielding commissioner candidates under his party’s banner.

During Monday’s Park Board meeting, in what may eventually be seen as a symbolic move, in a 4-3 vote, the newly recalibrated Park Board majority approved an urgent motion by Bastyovanszky condemning Sim’s proposal.

“When I agreed to run in the summer of 2022, the party was very clear that Ken was not planning to abolish the Park Board. In fact, in my first conversations with the party, the first question I was asked was how I felt about abolishing the Park Board because the party intends to keep it,” Christensen told City Council as a public speaker during Wednesday’s meeting.

“Throughout the course of campaigning, it was reiterated many times to me it was the party line that we were going to fix the Park Board, and there was no mention ever of removing it.”

Sim disputed Christensen’s account by stating that he indicated in a media interview five months before the October 2022 civic election that abolition would still be an option if it becomes apparent that the Park Board cannot be fixed from within. He also asserted that this “very clear” position was shared with the commissioner candidates.

The Mayor also brought up this week’s revelation by City and Park Board staff that Kitsilano Pool is now in extremely poor condition, with the outdoor pool leaking 30,000 litres of water per hour when filled after incurring storm damage in early 2022. He asserted part of the problem is because City and Park Board staff are not working together on the issues due to their jurisdictional differences.

“That’s exactly why we’re here because the system is set up to fail and we have a problem at Kits Pool that we have to fix. That is one of the main ones,” said Sim.

Over 160 public speakers were registered for Wednesday’s meeting, with the vast majority expressing their opposition to Sim’s motion for a range of reasons that include a perceived lack of transparency and an affront to democracy, and concerns that it could lead to a decrease in attention to the parks and recreation system, the dissolution of community centre associations, and a higher risk of the future sale and/or development of parklands. As well, over the weekend, more than two dozen previous Park Board commissioners released a joint statement expressing their opposition.

“I personally approached this meeting with a very open mind. I wanted to be convinced, I wanted someone to convince me, that every single city except for Minneapolis and Cultus Lake got it wrong,” said Sim during the closing remarks in the meeting before the vote, referencing that Vancouver is one of two major cities in Canada and the United States to have a separately elected body for governing the parks and recreation system.

“The overwhelming reasons for the arguments for keeping an elected Park Board are based on tradition in the past. And while we should celebrate tradition in the past, that is not a reason to keep the elected Park Board.”

To address the stated concerns, the Mayor said there would be “a lot” of community involvement, specifically noting community centre associations will be “vital in this new era of parks” and that they will work to “ensure that our team members of the Park Board are fully added to the City of Vancouver” by collaborating with the unions.

Earlier this week, City Council approved a 2024 operating budget of $168.8 million for the Park Board, which accounts for about 8% of the municipal government’s total operating budget for the year. Although the Park Board is independent of the City, its finances are directly controlled by the Mayor and City Council, which approves the Park Board’s operations and capital budget each year. But critics of this approach have repeatedly said that with the jurisdictional separation, the system does not encourage and incentivize the Mayor and City Council — past, present, and future — to allocate more of their political capital and attention towards the needs of the Park Board. Only City Council has taxation powers.

“The issue is certainly you need to fund the activities that are needed to make that park system robust to maintain the infrastructure and the buildings, the community centres, [and] the parks themselves so that they are in a good state of of of repair,” said Green councillor Adriane Carr.

“That’s that’s our decision. And if we haven’t given them the money, it’s not their fault. So I really wish that you would think about genuinely trying to fix it. Fix whatever you believe the problems are by collaborating with the Park Board now, genuinely collaborating on the budget, the streamlining of permits, and the kind of things the Auditor General of Vancouver came forward with.”

Green councillor Fry suggested the Mayor’s strategy, partly driven by a desire to reduce costs, sounds like a “very austere future.”

“I respect what the Mayor is trying to do, but I think this is going too fast, too soon, and is possibly not the way to do it,” said Fry.

“Given the overwhelming opposition that we heard from the public, including community centre associations who are doing the work in communities, doing that grassroots level, hearing from the dozens, hundreds of ABC supporters who are turning around and gobsmacked that this is how the Mayor is treating his elected Park Board commissioners… The public was not aware of the plan and denying the public any further opportunity to engage in this very significant move that disembodies a 130-year-old institution that is responsible for so much of what we love about our city.”

OneCity councillor Christine Boyle said, “There is so much important work to be done, including a lot of opportunities to improve coordination between the Park Board and the City. But I haven’t seen the Mayor or this Council majority try much of anything to fix those problems in the past year. You can’t try nothing and then say you’re all out of ideas.”

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