Park upkeep costs more here than other cities

Result of limited space, heavy use, official says

Montreal spends more per hectare on its parks than any other major Canadian city, the incoming director of large parks revealed Wednesday. The annual cost of running parks in Montreal is $33,546 per hectare, while it’s $24,351 in Toronto, $12,400 in Calgary and $10,148 in Winnipeg, said Louise-Hélène Lefebvre, Montreal’s new director of large parks, Mount Royal and sports. The reason is not that maintenance costs are higher in Montreal, but rather that the city has less green space per capita than other cities, she said. That means our parks attract more users, so they require more upkeep, she said during a presentation by the parks department on the 2019 budget and capital works program for 2019-2021. “We have parks in densely inhabited neighbourhoods, like La Fontaine Park, for example, which is very, very heavily used, so obviously it needs more maintenance than a park in an outlying area whose main purpose is nature conservation,” Lefebvre said in an interview after the presentation to the city’s finance and administration committee. “Mount Royal is another example. A park with five million visitors a year requires a lot of maintenance, so that cost is factored into our expenses,” she said. Montreal ranks dead last among major Canadian cities for green space, with just 250 hectares per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to the median of 473 hectares per 100,000 residents for Canada’s large cities as a whole, the parks chief noted in the presentation. The city would need to add 4,575 hectares of parkland to attain the median, she said. Regina is best endowed with parkland, with some 750 hectares per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by London, Calgary, Hamilton, Windsor, Winnipeg and Toronto. Montreal’s geography is another reason our parks require more upkeep, Lefebvre explained in the interview. Mount Royal’s fragile ecology requires “a lot of interventions to maintain,” she said. “We are an island, so we have a lot of shores,” she added. Land in waterfront nature parks like Cap-St-Jacques in the West Island and Pointe-aux-Prairies in Rivière-des-Prairies—Pointe-auxTrembles can be subject to erosion and needs special care, Lefebvre noted. The Valérie Plante administration has made it a priority to address Montreal’s green-space deficit, budgeting $60 million in the three-year capital works program to acquire green space and $56.8 to upgrade large parks. It will also transfer $57 million to boroughs to upgrade local parks. During the presentation, city officials also promised to help Montreal catch up with other Canadian cities’ investments in refrigerated outdoor skating rinks. Rosannie Filato, the executive committee member responsible for sports and leisure, said the city will add one new outdoor refrigerated rink about every year, starting with the Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district next year. The second, whose location has not yet been determined, will open in 2021, she said. “It’s a goal of our administration because we know how important refrigerated rinks are if we want families and children to skate outdoors, because of climate change,” she said.