USE SURPLUS FOR A NEW PARK
Take the long view and create a green space in the west end
If Calgary city council wants suggestions on how to spend the just-announced $86-million budget surplus, here’s one: Begin a new park fund and later spend it on a welldesigned green space with water fountains, benches and flower beds; add in an assortment of oak, maple, pine and larch trees; do so on city-owned land in the west end that some now covet for a taxpayer-subsidized concrete shrine for the Calgary Flames.
To briefly deal with the latter, two assertions are often advanced for subsidized arenas for professional, for-profit sports teams: mammoth concrete and steel structures ostensibly make a city “world class,” they provide net economic spinoffs.
Such notions have been debunked time and again. Paris is world class and has no hockey arena. On the numbers, as economists Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys have found, the peerreviewed economic literature shows “near unanimity” on this point: “stadiums, arenas and sports franchises have no positive impacts on jobs, incomes and tax revenues.”
That’s because absent taxpayer-subsidized stadiums and arenas, consumers will spend their entertainment and sports dollars elsewhere. That too creates employment, salaries and taxes.
Besides, fund a stadium through tax dollars, and you subsidize a private interest. I’m all for free enterprise. By definition, that means an absence of government subsidies for companies. In contrast, urban parks can hardly be construed as subsidizing any particular private business, unless one equates park buskers with professional, forprofit sports franchises that pay salaries in the millions of dollars.
Rather than recycle taxpayer money into corporate sports franchises, the tax dollars of Calgarians are better put into a west-end creation akin to New York City’s Central Park, Vancouver’s Stanley Park and Montreal’s Mount Royal Park.
In theory, of course, one could live without such parks. Examples of cities with few or small parks abound in poorer countries and also in much of Asia. There, postage-size urban parks are the tragic, tiny norm. City life in such locales is decidedly less pleasant.
But no one with any understanding of how and why urban public parks developed in North America — the late 19th century City Beautiful movement that sought to beautify cities for everyone (rich, poor and middle-class alike) — would wish for only sterile, concrete-and-blacktop metropolises. Such green-free urban settings grate and grind against the natural human desire for lifeaffirming green additions to city landscapes.
Specific to Calgary, I grant that potential west end green space would be much smaller than the noted Manhattan, Montreal and Vancouver parks.
However, on existing cityowned land, any addition of green grass, flowing fountains, a rainbow’s variety of flowers in spring, benches on which to sit and tall trees to beautify the panorama, would be preferable to another concrete structure. Plenty of those already necessarily exist in downtown in vertical form, as opposed to the horizontal, stadium variety which would add nothing to Calgary’s riverside or urban experience, but would subtract with every new inch of poured concrete.
In A Clearing in the Distance, his magnificent biography of the 19th century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the main creator of Central Park, Mount Royal Park and others, author Witold Rybczynski writes of a later reaction to Mount Royal by one observer in 1906: “A public park that is convenient and beautiful, and that becomes more and more satisfying each year.”
Rybczynski, himself a onetime professor of architecture at McGill University, described his own wanderings through Montreal’s most sublime park as “natural and magical; healthful and healing.” He writes of how he was often “lost in reverie” on such walks.
To wit, Calgary city council should take the long view with both the $86-million surplus and the west end: Think about a legacy that can last for centuries. Create a west end park fund and begin to ponder the potential for North America’s next most magnificent urban park.
Partnering with experts and successful private enterprise means we will continue to listen to the best advice, remain open and transparent in order to create a positive investment environment. Finance Minister Joe Ceci