Urban planners over in England have what is known as the “3-30-300” rule. It states that everyone should be able to see at least three trees from the window of their home, there should be 30 per cent canopy cover per neighbourhood, and a public park should be no more than 300 metres away.
Here in Niagara, our urban planners also have the “3-30-300” rule but the stipulations are a bit different. Our rule states that when building a park, we must have at least three pointless public engagement sessions, a minimum of 30 awful concept art renderings from an overpriced urban planning consultant, and the project must go at least $300K over budget.
Every single municipality in Niagara is bad at building parks. While working as a city hall reporter, I’ve witnessed the park building process get steadily worse and worse over the years, so the apparent ongoing debacle with Fenwick’s Centennial Park came as no surprise to me. If you want a full rundown of what’s going on with the park, a letter to the editor published here breaks it down in detail. The short version is that it’s over budget and behind schedule.
Which, as I said, is almost predestined to happen every single time when doing anything with a park these days, because what should be a very simple and straightforward process has ballooned into something much more complicated than it needs to be.
The first, and most tragic part of this process, is the public consultation period. There are times when public consultation is a good idea. Building or upgrading a park is not one of them.
Every municipality has a parks department that knows how to build a park. They’ve been doing it for decades without any issue. But nowadays you’re not allowed to build a park without checking off a bunch of lame buzzwords first, so that means “engaging with the public” to “gather valuable community feedback,” or, as it should be called, “wasting a bunch of time and money on nothing.”
Oh, guy-with-kids, you think there should be some swings and a slide at the park? Brilliant idea, never woulda thought of that on our own. Oh, old-bored-guy, you think there should be some pickleball courts at the park? Yes, we know, we are well aware that all old people are now legally required to play pickleball three times a week.
We are well aware that all old people are now legally required to play pickleball three times a week
Nothing gained at a public consultation session for a park is going to contribute anything that isn’t already painfully obvious. Stop it. Just build the dang park. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they didn’t host inane public consultation sessions before building a park, they just built the park, and it was fine. Go back to doing that and save the time, energy, and money.
Next thing is the awful urban planner consulting firms who get brought in to make “conceptual drawings” of the park. Again, waste of time and money.
We all know what a park looks like. Nobody needs to see a “vision rendering” for a park, least of all because the final product never looks like the idealistic perfect rendering from the conceptual stage. Graphic designers are charging us tens of thousands of dollars to photoshop clipart of slides and swings onto pictures of the old park.
A lot of times these give 10 different options, but they’re pretty much all the same except one will have the swings next to the park bench and another might have the slide there instead. It’s all so very pointless. Don’t overthink this stuff, just build it.
Solving these first two problems would go a long way towards solving the third problem: the inevitable cost overruns. There’s always going to be unforeseen costs and extra expenses. That’s just the cost of doing business these days. But if we take the wasted money we spend on public engagement and conceptual drawings, and set that side to deal with cost overruns, we can probably have these projects break even.
My real gripe with the endless quagmire of any park project is that despite nauseatingly long amounts of time spent in the planning stage, they never seem to plan for the one thing every park needs more of: garbage cans. Put more garbage cans at the park. I hate seeing overflowing garbage bins at every park, which always leads to people instead just throwing their trash on the ground, which is another pet peeve of mine.
Over in Thailand, they built a new national park in 2020 and during the planning phase, they set aside a budget for garbage mailing. They actually package litter up in boxes and mail it to the people who leave it behind with a little note inside that says, “You forgot these things at Khao Yai National Park.”
Now that’s a good use of park funding.
James Culic didn’t care about public parks until he had a toddler who is obsessed with going to the park. Find out how to yell at him (James, not his kid) at the bottom of this page, or send us your brilliantly unique swing and slide location concepts in a letter to the editor, preferably with a simulated architectural plotter paper background.
