Pitt and the park debate rages on in Nepean
Sides divided on how to honour ex-mayor can’t even keep the peace at breakfast
With tensions nearing the breaking point, Rick Chiarelli thought a breakfast meeting would help. If they couldn’t reach a compromise, maybe they could at least stop yelling at each other.
Community activist Maria Ricci and Centrepointe Community Association president Ron Benn each came, with an invitation to bring a handful of colleagues and supporters. Chiarelli brought former Nepean mayor Andy Haydon and Haydon’s wife, Sherry Franklin. They sat down together, ready to talk.
It was a disaster. “I think by the end, five or six people refused even to eat, in protest,” Chiarelli says. Benn called Ricci something rude, something nobody who was present will repeat.
At stake: Whether Centrepointe Park should be renamed for Nepean’s last mayor, Mary Pitt. Ricci says Pitt has been given short shrift by the city, her contributions poorly recognized. Benn says if that’s so, the city can fix it in a lot of ways besides renaming the park at the core of his neighbourhood.
Pitt was mayor for three years, from 1997 to 2000, after serving two decades as the senior aide to her popular predecessor, Ben Franklin. Franklin’s name is on the former city hall in Centrepointe and on a park at Knoxdale and Hunt Club roads. Haydon has the current city hall council chamber and a major park on the Ottawa River. The reeve of Nepean before him, Aubrey Moodie, has a school and Moodie Drive.
Pitt has a plaza with a fountain in Centrepointe Park, called Mary Pitt Legacy Court. By the end of August, city council is to vote on whether to rename the whole park for her.
Chiarelli, who represents the area and sat on the old Nepean council with Pitt, is reserving judgment.
“Her term as mayor was short and people argue about whether it was successful,” he says. “One thing I do know, is if you take the stuff she did before becoming mayor, and the stuff she’s done since being mayor, there’s no doubt she should be commemorated.” Besides being mayor, Pitt has been a senior board member and fundraiser for Queensway Carleton Hospital, the Nepean chamber of commerce and Villa Marconi.
But the question is in two parts, he says. It’s not just whether Pitt deserves to have something named for her — it’s whether Centrepointe Park is the right thing. The city put the idea out for public comments in May and the results are, well, a big problem.
Overall, with people submitting their views from as far away as Preston Street, the tone is 2-1 or even 3-1 in favour of the idea, Chiarelli says.
“The majority are in favour, but as you get closer to the park, it switches,” Chiarelli says.
Among the opponents is the Centrepointe Community Association, which has published a four-page rebuttal of the proposal. Pitt already has the court named after her. She was mayor for just one term and it wasn’t a particularly distinguished one. She has never lived in Centrepointe and spent much of her municipal career working in Bells Corners. A web poll drew 277 votes, 93 per cent of them opposed to the idea.
“She already has something in our community, where she has no connection,” says Benn. “If you want to commemorate her, put up a sign.” Mary Pitt may have a Legacy Court, he means, but it’s not obvious to passersby. It needs a better marking.
The idea to put Pitt’s name on the whole park came from Ricci, the president of the provincial Liberal party association in Ottawa West-Nepean, where Pitt is a longtime activist, and Benn sees a case of political friends looking after their own. Mayor Jim Watson was the riding’s Liberal MPP until 2010, and Pitt campaigned for him; Benn expects west-side councillors who support the renaming to get political help in return.
Support for the renaming that comes from beyond the neighbourhood is evidence for this idea, he says. Ricci can put out the call to Liberals across Ottawa; his association limits itself to Centrepointe.
“There is a culture of entitlement throughout the whole political class,” Benn says. “That’s what offends me the most.”
Ricci insists politics has nothing to do with it. Sure, she’s a Liberal, but plenty of Tories back the Pitt campaign, she says, which is about more than Pitt herself.
“I really believe Mary deserves this. But I’m also very adamant that the women in this city are honoured at the same level as their male cohorts,” Ricci says. Pitt was a mayor and she deserves the same treatment as the other former mayors, she says. Furthermore, Pitt is of Polish descent and that makes her Nepean’s only “ethnic” mayor.
The idea that the court is enough, Ricci says, “I find that quite offensive. And I don’t think that the women in this city — or even the men, and quite frankly I’m getting a lot of support from men on this issue — find that the court is the right thing to do.”
Pitt’s mayoral office was in Centrepointe, and it is fitting to name a park for her next to Ben Franklin Place, considering how intertwined her career was with that of her former boss, Ricci says.
Benn won’t be convinced. If Pitt needs a bigger commemoration, she should get a new park in a new south Nepean neighbourhood, where it won’t mean removing a name a community already likes, he says.
For Chiarelli, the dispute is evidence that Ottawa’s whole system for naming things after people is flawed.
Asking for public comments is meant to make the process transparent. It does that, but at a cost.
“We set up a system that, as one commemoree once told me, includes a mandatory 30-day humiliation process,” Chiarelli says. “This is possibly the least intelligent policy that we have, given the objectives.”