Index outdoor rink maintenance Strollers on the ice rinks as social spaces

2020

Nov.26, 2020

New covid-related rules for outdoor rinks change everything.

January 2020

Montreal rink, by Rebecca Catching

2019

Sept.11, 2019: new CIMCO ice maintenance contract was approved today

The details are in the Bid Award Report here.
Call Issued: June 18, 2019
Call Closed: July 23, 2019.
As usual, CIMCO/Toromont was the only bidder.

April 29, 2019: Maintaining the outdoor rinks

In June 2018, the city put out a procurement contract "request for quotes." Unsurprisingly, CIMCO got the contract -- but not until Nov.8 -- two weeks before most of the city's rinks were scheduled to open. CIMCO is really the only act in town. So why the delay in hiring them?

Peter White, the Parks manager, didn't know. Some sleuthing was needed -- always a tricky prospect at city hall. It's really more luck than sleuthing that led me to Elena Caruso.

The contract was for $1,165,732.00 for looking after 45 outdoor rinks for 17 weeks. The services to be delivered are in this link. It will be interesting to see how long the link remains live, since another manager told me today that it's not the city's policy to keep such links once an RFP or RFQ closes (meaning -- I think -- is awarded). Apparently it clutters up the city's website. In July 2019, the city is changing to a cloud-based provider called SAP Ariba. But it seems unclear how much information will be publicly available then.

There are some links (but it seems, focused on vendors, not on the people paying for the contracts, i.e. the taxpayers) here. Contracts are discussed and awarded by the city's Bid Awards Committee, which is not a committee with any councillors on it. But the General Government and Licensing Committee seems to have oversight. And all contracts over $20 million need to be run by City Council.

So much money. Some contract notes are here.

No response from city

---

January 5, 2019: Strollers on the outdoor rinks, and the accessibility act

Ontario’s accessibility act specifies that it applies to “Ontarians with disabilities,” but many people are not fond of such a negative descriptor. Just because I have arthritis in my knee and have trouble walking, for example, doesn’t mean I am defined in some broad way as DIS-abled. I just need to use a bike to get around instead of walking long distances. So I need curb cuts and good snow clearance in winter, when I bike to the park. Then I can get to where I want, just like people who get around by walking. Stopgap’s Luke Anderson, who uses a wheelchair, told us he prefers the expression “people who use wheels” to “wheelchair-bound.” When he spoke at the September 30 park meeting, Luke pointed out that the people who use wheels include parents and caregivers of babies, who use strollers – and therefore need curb cuts and good winter snow clearance and kneeling buses and subway elevators as well – or they can’t get around like people without strollers. Such adaptations are a win-win for everybody.

Nobody would think of telling a woman or a man with a stroller to stay off the bus, even if it’s a bit inconvenient for other passengers, and even if everybody has to be careful not to trip over the wheels. But if parents want to take two children to skate at an outdoor rink, and one child is a baby in a stroller, the rule is “go away, and come back when you no longer need to use wheels.” Access denied. “No fun allowed here for you, parents and children.”

Toronto is the world capital of mechanically-cooled outdoor rinks (we have almost 60), so that’s a lot of access – and fun – not allowed.

At Dufferin Rink, it never made any sense to the people who ran the rink to bar parents or caregivers of young children. So good skaters with babies in strollers have been able to skate here for most of the last 20 years. In that time, there has never been an accident involving a stroller. There’s been a lot of family fun, though.

Dufferin Rink had a real-time experiment showing that strollers are not causing accidents – wonderful. But now strollers are once again not allowed on the rink.

The law says Ontarians have the right to equal access if possible, and the 20-year Dufferin Rink experiment shows strollers are fine. It’s time for city authorities to change the rule everywhere. If not, then maybe it’s time for parents and friends of young children to make common cause with Luke Anderson and other people who use wheelchairs with the slogan – remove the barriers to participating in the social life of the community – for everyone.

That could be interesting.

News flash:

Shortly after this blog was published, the Dufferin Grove rink staff told a woman to get off the ice with her child in a stroller, that there was a long-standing rule against strollers on the ice. The skater and her sister, both at the rink with their families, complained to their two different councillors. After some back and forth, Councillor Paula Fletcher's assistant wrote back:

I have been corresponding with Todd Davison from Community Recreation at the City. He informed me that strollers are usually allowed on the ice if not being used as a skating aid and if the person is a confident skater. This is an issue he has been working on and he will let staff know about this.

Excellent! Access for families with small children is back.

2018

City outdoor rinks: community gathering places or tourist destinations?

Parks, Forestry and Recreation (PFR) was completely restructured in 2004. It takes time to turn a city department around, and this revolution took more than 10 years, getting everybody lined up going in the same direction. But now most of the job is done.

Here's how this affected the city's 50 neighbourhood outdoor rinks. Recreationists, who in wintertime used to run skating classes and little hockey leagues and flip burgers at neighbourhood skating events, were renamed "community recreation programmers" and were set in front of computers to do data entry. Becoming virtual data entry clerks made many of them unhappy. But their wages were increased enough that pushing against this transformation -- with the risk of being fired -- raised the stakes. Most went along, the rest left.

The staff re-structuring went with a re-definition of the "core values" -- now usually referred to as the "council-approved core business" -- of Parks and Rec. Consultants that were hired by the city recommended that most staff resources should go to registered fee-based programs rather than to drop-in places like outdoor rinks. Drop-in places were to be allocated only "minimal staff supervision."

The recommendations seem to have been approved by city council as part of a bigger package. The "core business" approach translated into turning most front-line rink staff into -- essentially -- security guards. Their job is not to set up fun things at the rinks but to sit at a rink office desk or to patrol the rinks. They do a bit of cleaning and otherwise monitor the behavior of the rink users, recast as "customers."

Since most rink users don't come to make trouble, new rules came out to keep the staff busy. Staff have to keep a close lookout for shinny hockey players and kids under 6 who are not wearing special CSA-approved hockey helmets, or who are taking photographs at the rink (not allowed). If skaters don't want to use a city-sanctioned helmet, or still try to take a photo, staff will eject them from the rink, and feel proud to have done their job exactly as outlined during their training.

Having the outdoor rinks run by security guards has taken away a lot of the fun. Attendance is often sparse. This fact appears to be only slowly dawning on city management. It comes up at meetings, but so far, there's not much action. There's no signage at rinks for opening dates. The city's outdoor rinks website is often unreliable during unstable weather, but the city won't publish rink phone numbers so that people can check if the rink they want to go to is really open. At some rinks, change rooms and washrooms may be locked on holidays. Some are not open on weekdays before 3, meaning school classes won't come. Change rooms are made only for skate/footwear changing, not for sitting and chatting with neighbours, or having a hot chocolate as part of the outing. With the exception of three rinks in Ward 18, no neighbourhood rinks have skate lending, because that's not part of the city's "core business."

So a new kind of rink has started up as an alternative: the tourist attraction. The Bentway skating trail is an example. There's plenty of seating, skate lending, hot drinks and alcohol in a cafe/bar setting, warming tables with cozy gas fires, food trucks on weekends, DJ nights, performances, art shows. Tourists, from both outside and inside Toronto, are expected to come in large numbers.

But it costs over a million dollars a year to run such a rink. Therefore, skate lending and drinks, priced to help cover that cost, add up to more than many ordinary families can afford. Plus: there's no shinny hockey! And the emphasis is on spectacle, not on making a community gathering place where near neighbors can meet in winter, as the outdoor rinks were meant to be.

There are simple, cheap ways to make the neighbourhood rinks work as gathering places and make them more fun again. Those ways don't need more money, in fact the rinks will be cheaper to run than now. But the remedy does require Parks and Rec management to admit that their 2004 restructuring didn't work. Learning from mistakes is an honorable way to get good at things! (Jane Jacobs: "if people could just look at their mistakes, and be honest about them, and learn from them, what a lot we could get done.")

There's no sign that this reckoning has begun. Too many city staff are invested in the power that they have under the current system, top-heavy in management and meetings. So the waste of our rinks, and the more-than-$6-million-a-year in taxes to pay for them each year, will continue for now. City councillors will continue to be distracted by the glitter of mega-projects, instead of checking the pantry for useful resources we already have.

Too bad.

---

Amplified music and ads from the Nathan Phillips skating rink, booming all over our civic square?

Family Day

---

2017

Climate change and mechanically-cooled outdoor rinks

A letter from Lauren Archer:

Our answer:

Attendance for drop-in shinny hockey at the city's mechanically-cooled outdoor ice rinks has been going down despite good ice. Fewer skaters are coming. The reason I mentioned declining attendance is actually not unrelated to climate change. It's kind of fascinating how much people rely on their news feeds (as well as the weather forecast apps) to make their plans. It's not unusual for people to say that they're sure the artificial ice rinks must be on the decline because it's too warm, and so they are switching, already now, to some other kind of physical activity, usually inside a gym. But the compressor-cooled outdoor rinks are not declining at all -- their ice is good most of the time.

Climate change is a handy explanation for a host of unrelated problems:

1. When the cities amalgamated in 1997, rink staff had their season-start-up night-time ice-making shifts changed to daytime, i.e. they were sometimes trying to make ice in sunshine. Also, the ice-making days were shortened from 6 days to 3 days prior to opening date. Neither of those practices are considered acceptable in the ice-making industry, but they fit in better with staff holidays and trying to finish fall chores.

So the rinks are often not open on time. The reason given is once again, "climate change." CC makes such a good excuse for every kind of poor workmanship.

2. Until the cities amalgamated in 1998, the rink season in central Toronto was from mid-November until the end of February (from the time of the first A.I.R.'s in the 1970's). That's when (observation showed) the sun is weak and the rinks are best. Then in the past 5 or so years, for political reasons, the city councillors extended the rink season into mid-to-late-March. A staff report that showed low usage and bad ice in March seems to have been ignored. People see the mush and talk about how "climate change" is hurting the rinks.

The irony is that running the rink machinery under the March sun is so energy-intensive. As our website says, using all that power in the higher-sun time is both financially and environmentally indefensible. But so far, the widespread use of "climate change" to explain every kind of bad ice-making practice seems to have paralyzed both thrift and good sense in some places. In heritage terms, those are traditional virtues :-)

---

---

2016

Here are some "lighter, quicker, cheaper" (LQC-type) fixes we proposed in our 2016 Outdoor Rink Report for some Toronto outdoor rinks.

Scarborough Civic Rink in 2018?

Knock out a wall, add some windows, snacks, and loaner skates.

The empty market building could be used for skate lending.

Each could be done for between $5000 and $30,000. But sadly, city hall wouldn't consider our report. The councillors message was effectively "go away." So for now we'll have to stop trying to help make rinks better. But we'll still document what rink users say, and what we see on rink visits.

hosted by WordAndData.com | powered by pmwiki-2.2.80
Content last modified on November 26, 2020, at 12:16 PM EST