As Park Board fees rocket, election looms
As Park Board fees rocket, election looms
If you’re a parent and you want to know why you’re suddenly broke all the time, look no further than the Vancouver Park Board. Over the past three years, the board has repeatedly raided the wallets of parents to pay for an ever-increasing operating budget.
On Nov. 19, Vancouver will elect a new Park Board.
Typically, middle-class families don’t come to Park Board meetings, so it’s possible the commissioners haven’t added up how much is being newly shouldered by parents. For my family, we’re paying over $1,000 a year in new fees (after taxes).
Here’s what’s changed since Vision Vancouver’s majority began at Park Board in 2008:
1. In November 2010, most Vision commissioners voted to lower the age a child starts paying for swimming, skating and other fees from six years old, to three. For one family (with two kids) trip to the Aquatic Centre at Hillcrest, for example, it changes the fees from $5.80 to $11.60 (plus HST). For a family with two kids who swim twice a week, that’s an additional $1,934 in total fees by the time their kids are six.
2. Back in the 1990s, Park Board introduced parking fees at beaches and some parks. Those have escalated to as much as $3 an hour, and $10 a day. While it’s true that 35 per cent of the change is due to 2008’s provincial tax increases, the Park Board didn’t find those savings elsewhere. The taxes were just tacked on. Parking hits the parents of young kids particularly hard, because the alternatives (bus and bike) can be near-impossible, depending on the trip, the weather and the kids.
3. Summers since 2010, part of Stanley Park has been taken over by the First Nations tourism business, Klahowya Village. This includes the miniature railway, which is normally $3.13 per person, or $12.52 per family. But riding the train while Klahowya exists costs $48 for a family of four (until low visitorship prompted a fee change in July of 2011)–turning an affordable 15-minute treat into an extravagance.
4. Since the 1980s, Park Board has been closing low-fee neighbourhood outdoor pools. The latest one to fall was Mount Pleasant Pool, at 16th near Main Street, in 2009. Fiscally, this was a responsible move on the part of the Park Board. But for some families, it means a $6 summer
evening swim has become an $16 affair, after paying for parking and higher pool entrance fees.
5. This Park Board voted to increase the footprint of the high-fee Vancouver Aquarium, and close the low-fee petting zoo at Stanley Park. It’s part of a long train of events that have made a day at Vancouver’s premiere park increasingly expensive. Twenty years ago, a family could drive there and park for free, see the extensive free zoo, and enjoy a cheap ride on the miniature railway and a cheap visit to the petting zoo. No longer.
COPE Park Board commissioner Loretta Woodcock said the increases in fees are terrible, but the board is burdened with a mightily-increasing operating budget and no other way to meet it. In a phone interview, she noted that the board’s 221 parks, 24 community centres, 151 playgrounds and other facilities are 60 per cent taxpayer funded (which Park Board can’t increase) and 40 percent user fee-funded.
“It’s been a real challenge,” Woodcock said, noting she won’t run again. “Some decisions had to be made that don’t feel good.”
Voters will decide soon, Nov. 19 to be exact, whether the increases are enough to merit a change in Park Board leadership.
I can't speak to a lot of the fees, but I can comment on fees for swimming pools.
Swimming pools do not make money. They lose money. They are heavily subsidized as a public service, in part to improve knowledge and practice of water safety. Water is fun to play in but very unforgiving of those who don't know how to swim and those who are vulnerable, such as young children.
In many places, public swimming pools keep expenses down by underpaying lifeguards and swimming instructors. Just like everywhere else, low pay impacts staff qualifications and experience. Where hourly pay rates are $13, often the lifeguards are young, inexperienced, and not certified as lifeguards. (They might have their bronze cross or bronze medallion, which are lifesaving awards as distinct from lifeguarding awards. Having certification from the National Lifesaving Society and going through regular re-certification requires some fairly intensive training not only in swimming skills and fitness, but in rescue and first aid, as well as in the most efficacious approaches to teaching swimming and water safety effectively to all age groups, whether they do or don't speak English.)
Without proper qualification and annual recertification, as well as regular in-service training opportunities, it's easy for lifeguards (or any other emergency personnel) to forget what they've learned. Particularly if they work at a pool where there's not a lot of daily action, they can get rusty (no pun intended) so, if a real emergency arises, they're not equipped to handle it. If they work in locations where they see a lot of daily action, the need to be ready at a pin-drop to handle whatever surprising situations arise is very real and present.
Public swimming pools in Metro Vancouver demand high standards of their lifeguards and instructors. They must be recertified regularly (at personal cost) and they must attend regular in-services. To stay on their toes, some also participate in lifeguarding competitions. (A few months ago, a Metro Vancouver team came second in a national lifeguarding competition.) While senior guard staff may have degrees in recreation and/or administration, on-deck staff are often university students or recent high-school graduates on their way to figuring out what to do next. Many go on to become teachers, paramedics, and even physicians. There's a stereotype of lifeguards as big, dumb jocks who just like showing off their bodies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I'm not saying I think it's right to lower the age at which children are charged for admission to three years, or to charge for parking. But I'm also not a parks board commissioner and I don't know what their options were for bringing in the revenues required to keep all of Vancouver pools operating at some of the highest standards (as I understand it) in the country. I have raised three children (one of whom is a full-time lifeguard working to become a physician) and I know how hard it can be to schlep little ones on public transit for 45 minutes to an hour and then pay what seems like a ridiculous amount of money for a little, wee kid to be admitted.
On the other hand, water is unforgiving and, as a parent, I was always pretty happy with the quality of attention the guard and teaching staff at the pools we frequented devoted to their jobs and to the children and families they worked with. So while we never had a lot of money to shell out for anything when the kids were little, I paid the price of ensuring they learned water safety from qualified instructors and played under the watchful eye of qualified guards and reminded myself that the price was a lot less than I would have had to pay for most other lessons and recreational activities. And that there are means for truly low-income families to access swimming pool services for free.
As I said, I can't speak to the other fee increases. On the face of it, though, none of them seem unreasonable. People want paved parking lots at outdoor beaches; paving costs money, and lifeguards for oceanfront beaches require more skills and experience and therefore more pay than other lifeguards. First Nations people have a right to take back some of their land and run profitable businesses; they were here long before Europeans and white folks have lived off the fat of the land while First Nations people lived in abject poverty for years. I love swimming at outdoor pools and regret the closure of so many of them; but the public likes big recreation complexes with wave pools and hot tubs and saunas and there's not enough money for everything so choices have to be made and the majority often rules. I loved the Stanley Park petting zoo, but it costs more to take care of all those animals and the grounds they live on than they can ever make back in funding and donations; the Aquarium is self-supporting.
Should the money to preserve these services come from somewhere else, like corporate taxes or taxes on wealthier people? I believe so, and maybe you do to. Perhaps you're going to write a subsequent article linking these cutbacks to the bigger picture. I think that would be a great way to put a very personal face on the much larger issue of making low-income families pay for or lose services that wealthier people just take for granted, instead of making parks board reps out to be heartless and thoughtless, when I'm pretty sure they're not.
