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posted April 8, 2006
The park staffing budget and cost recovery by the City of Toronto:
For some years now, friends of the park have been asking the City’s Parks and Recreation Division to recognize Dufferin Grove Park as a kind of neighborhood laboratory of public space, a community centre without walls. Noting that most of the City’s community centres with walls cost upwards of $600,000 a year to run, and that this park has become at least as busy, we asked for a staffing budget of $164,000, for Dufferin Grove. This request was never taken seriously. But in 2005, the local recreation supervisor, Tino DeCastro, was willing to try an experiment. He had enough money from user fees (from programs at Mary McCormick Community Centre and Wallace-Emerson Community Centre), that he could assign almost as much as we asked, for staff working at Dufferin Grove Park. (His total area budget was about $1.6 million, and user fees for those centres brought in another $1.1 million – in this area there are the two community centres, and Dufferin Grove is the main park).
Dufferin Grove Park worked much better as a result of the improved staffing. But the Parks and Recreation management was not pleased, and in February Recreation Director Don Boyle said the park would have to return to a recreation budget of only $65,600 a year.
posted April 8, 2006
What do our taxes pay for?
Numerous difficult discussions with management since then have circled around the idea of "cost recovery." Dufferin Grove Park is a problem, because it does not charge user fees for most of what goes on there. The costs of paying staff – to make the park work well – are thus un-recovered, and counted as a loss.
This is a puzzle. After all, people do pay taxes to run the parks. $141 million of our taxes will go to the Parks and Recreation Division to look after public space in 2006. User fees bring in many millions more.
If the goal is total "cost recovery" for parks and recreation staffing costs, what are the $141 million in taxes for?