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Jutta Mason, Editor
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Friends of Dufferin Grove Park Website and Newsletter
Editor:
Jutta Mason
Illustrations:
Jane LowBeer
Webmaster:
Henrik Bechmann (bechmann.ca)
Digital photographs:
Wallie Seto
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875 Dufferin Street
This website was originally developed thanks to a generous grant from the Toronto Parks and Trees Foundation.
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From the editor
Elinor Ostrom
Last February, when city recreation supervisor Tino De Castro was transferred away from Dufferin Grove Park and from Ward 18, the city’s new ombudsman received hundreds of letters of protest, and a park user started a Facebook group about the issue. Over the two weeks that followed, more than 2000 people joined that group, many of them objecting to bureaucratic centralization, expressed in this case by Tino’s transfer. The park made new friends, but the problems of centralization remain.
One of the people who wrote on the Facebook ‘wall’ was John Bowker, park user and owner of the bookstore “She Said Boom” on Roncesvalles. John suggested that the work of Elinor Ostrom would be helpful in understanding what was happening at Dufferin Grove. Few of us had heard of this person. From John we found out that she received the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, for her work describing and encouraging local governance of common-pool resources (like fish, high-mountain meadows, and groundwater, for example). We wondered – are public parks a common pool resource?
We learned that Professor Ostrom began her inquiry into the governance of the commons in California by learning about the groundwater supply under some of the cities there, water which was threatened with depletion because of overuse.
Toronto’s municipal budget may share some common qualities with California’s groundwater resources. The supply of tax revenue, like the supply of groundwater, is renewable but limited. In Toronto’s parks and public spaces – important common resources – there have been danger signs of “tax depletion” for some years. Every year more of the Parks, Forestry and Recreation Division’s budget is being used for mandated wage increases (management as well as union), and the increases are mounting up faster than taxes are coming in. Even with $100 million in revenue (much of it from user fees) $260 million more in city tax funds are needed to run Parks, Forestry and Recreation in 2010 – more than double what was spent only ten years ago ($124 million in the year 2000). At the same time there are more broken picnic tables, shrunken programs, fee increases, and hat-in-hand approaches to corporate funders.
Each municipal budget report says “this pattern is not sustainable.” That’s for sure! Attempts to dig out of the hole preoccupy the Parks and Recreation staff, so that less and less of their effort is available to make the best use of the parks and recreation centres. But Elinor Ostrom’s accounts of “governing the commons” in various localities may help. CELOS continues its friendly argument with City Hall, urging less central control and much more active, detailed collaboration with local users and on-site staff. To find out more, go to celos.ca/database/policy theory.
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