How does City of Vancouver maintenance impact Park Board facilities?

A partial collapse of the exterior wall near the main entrance of the aging Vancouver Aquatic Centre in March 2022. (Daily Hive)

Ever since Mayor Ken Sim announced his plan to dissolve the elected body of Vancouver Park Board commissioners in late 2023, the Vancouver City Council under his ABC party leadership and the previous composition of ABC Park Board commissioners have been locked in a struggle over jurisdictional authority and the performance of Vancouver’s parks and recreation system.

Park Board commissioner and chair Brennan Bastyovanszky, now completing his term as an independent, is looking to challenge some of those assertions.

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In a member motion that will be deliberated in a public meeting next week, Bastyovanszky is asking Park Board commissioners to approve measures that would direct Park Board staff to complete a performance review of the services provided by the City of Vancouver’s Real Estate and Facilities Management (REFM) department toward the planning of maintenance and renewal of facilities under Park Board jurisdiction.

He says REFM oversees select assets such as community centres, ice rinks, swimming pools, field houses, washrooms, concessions, golf course buildings, marinas, and Park Board-related utilities.

According to Bastyovanszky, REFM took over such responsibilities in 2009, which was during a period of substantial upheaval for the municipal government, within the early period of Vision Vancouver’s first term. He wants a historical comparison of how facilities were managed prior to 2009, including how the Park Board used to do capital planning and maintenance.

As a result of these previous decisions, the Park Board has lost some of its in-house engineering and maintenance expertise. This has also been highly evident with the controversy over the poor state and prolonged closure of the Stanley Park Train, as the recent and ongoing fixes of the attraction have necessitated contracted consultant expertise and the work of the City’s Engineering department, as opposed to solely Park Board crews.

His motion asks Park Bard staff to provide an interim report in Fall 2024, ahead of a more detailed report in the second quarter of 2025.

Additionally, wrote Bastyovanszky, the report should include any recommendations on potential changes to a 2014 partnership agreement between REFM and the Park Board, which outlines the service descriptions, service levels, and performance metrics.

Upon inquiry, Bastyovanszky told Daily Hive Urbanized that REFM has overseen $347 million of deferred maintenance of Park Board facilities, which he asserts is the main contributing factor to the 2022 collapse of a sizeable section of Vancouver Aquatic Centre’s outdoor wall and the current precarious state of the Kitsilano Outdoor Pool.

Detailed design and planning work is now well underway for a new replacement and expanded Vancouver Aquatic Centre, which will cost$140 million and be completed in 2026.

The ABC-led City Council approved a motion last month to expedite the planning for a new replacement Kitsilano Outdoor Pool. Further interim fixes are expected to enable the continued operation of the existing beleaguered pool for up to an additional two years, with the facility scheduled to reopen in early August.

Bastyovanszky also told Daily Hive Urbanized that he is urging the ABC-led City Council to fulfill their election promise of restoring the Emergency Restoration Fund (ERF), which would enable quicker fixes of critical Park Board facilities and infrastructure.

“Now that we have quantified the value of the capital deficit, we are bringing a motion to honour that campaign promise,” he said.

As part of their rationale for dissolving the elected Park Board commissioners, Sim and ABC elected officials have stated in the past that they do not have a direct skin in the political game, as they do not have jurisdictional authority over direct planning and policy outcomes for matters that are under Park Board jurisdiction.

Consecutive mayors and city councils have shied away from Vancouver’s parks and recreation matters for this reason, including being less responsive to the Park Board’s spending requests.

All the while, City Council controls and provides final approval for the Park Board’s capital budget, including major contract awards, and operating expenses.

In October 2021, the previous makeup of Park Board commissioners unanimously approved a plan to double the number of full-time park rangers from 16 to 31. This was a measure in response to a 1,153% increase in the number of reported park-related cases to park rangers over a five-year period. To double the number of park rangers, Park Board commissioners asked City Council for $1.8 million in new operating funding between 2022 and 2023. But during their process of finalizing the 2022 budget, City Council approved $300,000.

Premier David Eby has indicated that he will commit to changing the provincial government’s Vancouver Charter legislation to eliminate the Park Board’s elected body, but only after the October 2024 provincial election. The governance responsibilities for Vancouver’s parks and recreation system would be entirely transferred to the mayor and City Council.

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