We fall woefully below the standard urban minimum of 2k hectares green space per 1k inhabitant.
If you subtract Angrignon and Mount Royal parks, our park situation is abysmal indeed.
The Projet Montreal administration was swept in with bold environmental promises but have been blind their own contribution to the ongoing erosion of green space.
There is a simple solution: ban councilors from sacrificing public green space.
City councillors have long reduced Montreal's green space by handing it off to groups that they feel will provide them votes in coming elections.
Take the example of St. Raymond's parish in lower NDG (below the tracks on Demaisonneuve and west of Decarie).
The area contains only one-tenth the standard urban minimum of green space.
That tiny sliver of remaining green space is concentrated in the 270,000-square foot Oxford Park and councillors have been permitted to parcel it off a staggering pace.
One third of that precious green space in the park was given away over the last two decades.
Firstly, the grass soccer field was fenced off and replaced with plastic, costing 70,000 square feet.
Another 10k of green was taken away for a community center.
Then an additional 5k square feet claimed for a bocce court.
Then another 12k was paved over for an oversized basketball facility.
The basketball court was particularly galling, as the self-proclaimed "green" Projet Montreal city councillor Peter McQueen had 12,000 square feet of green space paved over without any discussion with local stakeholders. The outdoor court sits 40 yards from a newly-built public indoor basketball court.
To make matters worse, the borough last year graveled over an 1,000 square feet of green park space for an old abandoned shipping container, which will be purportedly used one day to give out crayons to summer camp kids, a function that could have been easily handled by the adjacent community center.So in total the 270,000 square feet of green space has been whittled down by about one-third without any consultation or thought to its impact.
In this case - and surely other areas have seen their parks eroded in the same way - the borough overlooked another possible solution that would have prevented the senseless loss of green space.
The city owns a nearby 300,000 square foot parking lot and warehouse facility at Madison and St. James.
The huge plot of land is fenced off from the public and was once partially used as an environmental recycling dump.
The area surrounding that 300,000 city space is getting rapidly developed, so there's little valid argument that a sprawling city truck parking lot fulfills the best-usage criteria for that land.
The trucks and storage space on the lot could be relocated to a more suitable nearby industrial area like Ville St. Pierre.
This newly-freed up area used to create recreational facilities or green space.
So far municipal authorities have been unwilling or unable to make a better use of their sprawling snow truck parking lot but have had no difficulty whittling away the precious green space in the area.
If a municipal administration wishes to represent good environmental practices it needs to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.
It must threaten with banishment any councillor who gives away a single blade of public green space.
The Environment and Green Spaces - Part One:
ReplyDeleteWhile we and other blog contributors have discussed these issues in the past, they definitely deserve to be repeated as it is clearly obvious that the city of Montreal has become derelict in its duty in maintaining and expanding green spaces where possible.
In particular, why are some public parks in certain districts very poorly managed while others elsewhere on the island are overly pampered with well-laid-out, paved pathways, immaculate grounds-keeping, new benches, and even fountains?
How did Peter McQueen justify the paving over of that portion of Oxford Park and why, in his opinion, would he consider such paving to be an "improvement".
Incredibly, there exist some city parks where the soccer nets are perpetually chained up and unusable by anyone. So why not simply remove the nets completely if they don't want anyone to play soccer there? Has the city given up on generating more interest in soccer over baseball, which presumably was its original intent?
Obviously much has happened during the subsequent years since soccer was supposed to "replace" baseball. I don't remember which mayor it was who made that drastic decision and why, but he certainly screwed things up.
Since then, city administrations have changed along with their priorities, which is no surprise, but up until the year 2000 or so when a great majority of our parks had fixed baseball diamonds used both by organized teams as well as local kids, at least these were available for continuous use. The city should never have "fixed" what wasn't broken in the first place.
While it is true that much has been done recently to upgrade the apparatus within kiddie playgrounds, the poor maintenance (if one can call it that!) of park fields, greenery, and pathways is unforgivable. Why the hell do some public works crews deliberately drive their heavy trucks onto the grass thereby leaving ugly deep grooves which eventually fill up with muddy rain water? Never do I see these grooves being repaired. Years ago you would never see such flagrant negligence. Even on the occasions when I've asked park crews about such issues, I receive "I don't know" or "it's not my problem" type answers and thus far my emails to the city have been ignored. Is this what we pay taxes for? I suspect that the unions still maintain a grudge against their employer the city which may partially explain the unsatisfactory and unacceptable status quo.
The Environment and Green Spaces - Part Two:
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, the blame can be shared. Could it be that some of those work crews simply don't like the people they see using the park and so become lazy out of spite? Perhaps some workers have given up the hope that litterbugs and graffiti vandals will grow out of their bad habits? They may have a long wait. Cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic water bottles, disposable dinnerware, piles of burnt barbecue charcoal, beer and liquor bottles, bottle caps, discarded clothing--you name it, it's there in all of its ugliness. It's plain to see that our city is becoming dirtier by the year and worst of all in the spring where all of those discarded anti-freeze containers become exposed from beneath the melted snow. I wonder if those who are making this mess are reading this and feel some sense of shame for their actions, or is that truly too much to ask? You rarely actually catch them in the act, either, which I can only guess proves they are fully aware that they're just a bunch of lazy, inconsiderate slobs. Do they toss trash on their living room floors, I wonder?
Some years ago there were public protests when McDonald's and their competitors announced plans to open up new fast food outlets near certain residential areas. The protesters feared that take-out customers would just toss their debris onto the street and elsewhere once thay had fed their faces--which is exactly what happened. Indeed, the former McDonald's on the southwest corner of Park Avenue and Mont-Royal Avenue didn't last very long, possibly due to the complaints.
Although our recycling centres have apparently become very popular, much more needs to be done to curtail waste and pollution. Too many food packages have "recyclable for refund where applicable" written on them, yet nowhere can they be exchanged for cash. Our supermarkets' Envipco and Tomra plastic bottle and can crushers don't accept anything made outside of Quebec, even though they should be re-purposed to so. Finally, whatever happened to those handy green domes where anyone could dispose of recyclable items? They vanished with no explanation.
Good points. I saw McQueen in Oxford Park yesterday listening to another resident's complaints but when I strolled over, he quickly said goodbye to the guy and dashed off. So there you go. I saw him on FB once dismissing the loss of the greenspace, saying that it wans't trees so it doesn't matter. He's just a bad city councillor, period.
ReplyDeleteAs for the soccer fields replacing baseball diamonds, I too rue that. I think it was under Tremblay that this started but it also might've been Bourque. It's surely another case of government by insurance company, as evidence in the awful bit of business at Fletcher's Field where that outrageous decision was taken to ban softball at a longstanding pickup softball spot.
My experience with the actual workers at the parks is positive. They seem pretty cool. One of them, an English guy, showed me an app that can recognize stars in the skies. Seemed very intelligent. But the grass is a tragedy. Just weeds everywhere and no plan to fix it.
The plan is to replace grass with something better, more ecological, and more useful. Grass is not some sacred thing.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/environnement/201905/19/01-5226763-montreal-en-a-assez-du-gazon.php
Once again "the plan is..."
ReplyDeleteY'notice how the decisions are being made by everybody but the stakeholders?
While it is true that some of the Montreal Public Works and park employees I've spoken with seemed to take pride in their work, I suspect that their hands are tied when it comes to taking individual initiative. Furthermore, a growing number of these crews consist of recent immigrants who likely dare not rock the boat with their supervisors who are mandated to maintain strict union rules. After all, the workers don't make the final decisions. There is no excuse, however, for flagrant abuse like driving trucks onto the grass and the folly of removing the original asphalt pathways because the city is too cheap or it's "too much trouble" to repair or replace them. Are muddy paths considered an "improvement" upon which the public must walk?
ReplyDeleteAs has been noted in previous section of this blog, we can thank our former Mayor Drapeau for reorganizing the parks department back in the mid 1950s. Up until then, our parks were basically just fields. Some had wooden shacks (painted dark green) with rudimentary restrooms. A few of them even included hot dog and french fry counters which were only open during certain events and weekends.
Oddly enough, back then there were many more drinking fountains available than exist today. One could find several of those vintage, hands-free, continuously-flowing, valveless types to quench one's thirst on hot summer days. The existing pavilion next to Beaver Lake opened in 1961 and on its ground was a display of model sailing boats which, presumably, were part of some regular event that for some reason I always managed to miss. I can only assume that such events must have been restricted to a very limited schedule. At some point in the 1970s and the big white ducks and their little house in the middle of the lake were taken away in the 1980s following an act of vandalism.
But aside from our major parks like Mount Royal and Lafontaine, as the decades passed and maintenance costs increased, subsequent city administrations obviously gave up on Drapeau's original plan and the deterioration worsened. It has only been since the mid 1990s that significant infrastructure changes began to appear and not always thoughtful ones at that, in my opinion.
It is unacceptable, of course, that only selected parks in certain districts of the city are better maintained and improved upon while others elsewhere are either short-sighted in their planning or left to crumble. This has to change.