The $700,000 in cuts to the Vancouver Park Board’s 2011 budget started to show itself as long uncut grass abutting the seawall walk between the Vancouver Aquatic Centre and English Bay during the Canada Day long weekend.
When park board commissioners voted in December to approve the roughly $100 million budget, they knew the cuts would mean fewer flower beds, and less lawn mowing and tree pruning, among other sacrifices.
Had commissioners not approved $200,000 in extra funding to keep public washrooms open and maintain cleaning services and $100,000 to eliminate youth user fees at playing fields, it would have been a $1 million reduction.
Non-Partisan Association (NPA) Coun. Ian Robertson told Business in Vancouver July 6 he was concerned that the park board suffered $5.3 million in cuts to its operations budget during the last three years.
“[The city] finds the money to be able to fund things like operations costs to maintain the bike lanes and to install a community garden at city hall while we are making cuts to the park board which are significant,” he said.
“We’ve got visitors who come from all over the world to see world-class parks such as Queen Elizabeth Park and Stanley Park, which are not getting the maintenance that they deserve.”
The $12 million renovation of the Stanley Park seawall, which reopened July 5, did not come out of the park board’s operations budget. Instead, it came from federal stimulus money as well as from the park board’s $119 million capital budget.
Glen Korstrom
Twitter: GlenKorstrom