Reid Park consultant recommendations

For months now, my consultant Wesley Petite has been holding workshops and receiving feedback on how we can use money set aside for the improvement of Reid Park. To quickly re-cap, when I came into office, I began to hear about a desire in the community to re-visit a prevous proposal for building a new field house in the park. In consultation with residents, I put the proposal on hold, and launched the current process.

We've been consulting since July, and I'm satisfied that we've had a chance to hear most of the thinking in the community about the way forward. Wesley has captured a series of recommendations stemming from those consultations in a document that you can find here or attached below. These fit within the envelope of money that we have, and to my eye capture the same themes and desires that I've been hearing about for months. It's important to note that we've been hearing by email from residents who couldn't attend the multiple workshop sessions. I think we've heard a pretty representative set of views.

Unless these recommendations seriously misstate a mainstream consensus and compromise about park improvements, I'm ready to move ahead with asking our planners to implement them. Before I do, though, I'd invite people to get in touch directly with me. In the process, I'll be asking our planners to sharpen their pencils on some items to see whether we can squeeze out enough money from the budget to implement the washroom that is a big-ticket item on the wish-list currently going unfilled. My intention is to get that process kicked off in January, with many of the improvements done this spring and summer.

What do you think? Do these capture what we've been hearing?

I would absolutely be remiss not to thank Wesley for his very hard work over the past months to get us to this point. I'd also like to thank your community association, the Civic Hospital Neighbourhood Association, and president Karen Wright in particular for her engagement with this process.

A quick note, I'm waiting for a graphic from Wesley to show a bit better what some of the proposed changes might look like. Stay tuned.

Thanks, Kitchissippi.