Green gem in good hands?

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Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press David Hanks shows his slack-line skills on a wire tied between trees at Assiniboine Park.

My old pal Gary Watkins knew there was something different about Assiniboine Park, what with all the new development around the old duck pond.

He just didn't know how different.

Not until he tried calling a couple of city councillors to voice his concerns about a cluster of billboards that sprouted like an invasive species just over the footbridge beside the path to the pavilion.

"Sign pollution," Gary called it.

So he called Scott Fielding and Paula Havixbeck, the two city councillors whose constituencies border the century-old park, and left messages.

It was the unexpected message Gary got back from politicians that suggested what was really different. They said the city doesn't have anything to do with the operation of the park.

That surprised the 65-year-old, who has treated the park like his own backyard since he was a kid and still goes there to relax and play the bagpipes.

He's far from the only one who didn't know that as of January, with the exception of roadways, the city has given up all operational responsibilities in the century-old jewel of Winnipeg's proud park system. In its place, a non-profit organization known as the Assiniboine Park Conservancy has taken over the redevelopment, maintenance and, yes, marketing of the over 160 hectares of lawns, trees and assorted attractions, including the biggest and most lucrative draw of them all.

The zoo is in the midst of being revitalized and rebranded with an indigenously appropriate menagerie, in a tourist-attractive way. To pay for all the redevelopment -- which is advertised on the cluster of signs Gary and other park purists abhor -- the conservancy has committed to raise $200 million over the next decade. Interestingly, the park conservancy model isn't new, nor is the reason it came about. City council's decision to lease the park to the new arm's-length operating entity came after years of budget cuts and neglect. Which is also what happened in New York City, just prior to the creation more than 30 years ago of the Central Park Conservancy.

"Everything was falling apart," is the way Assiniboine Park Conservancy CEO and president Margaret Redmond characterized Winnipeg's equivalent situation when the city finally began looking at the conservancy model. "The city couldn't afford what it wanted to do."

Judging by what Redmond was telling me Thursday -- after I asked why the city couldn't have just kept control and hired a fundraiser -- there might have been an added incentive to adopt the conservancy model here.

Several years ago, Redmond said, the city undertook a series of studies, one of which canvassed Winnipeg's Big Money on how much they would donate for the redevelopment of the park.

"The No. 1 message was; 'As long as the city was at the helm of this, I won't give.' "

Redmond said she thinks that was because there was a sense municipal governments aren't good at vision or sustainability.

Hard to argue with that.

But Winnipeg Big Money's message came with another, she said.

"You need an entrepreneurial culture. You need vision."

But that model comes with an added cost. First, there's the $800,000 in salaries for the six new conservancy executives who weren't part of the park when city bureaucrats ran it.

Plus a fundraising staff of 10.

Then there's the other potential cost that concerns people like me, and that Redmond acknowledges. By imposing more and more, and higher and higher fees -- to make up for less city support in the coming years -- our public park won't feel as open to everyone. There's something else, though. All the redevelopment, as welcome as most of it is, could threaten the very nature of the park's natural quality.

"The serenity," as Redmond calls it.

She and her board -- chairman and driving force Hartley Richardson, University of Winnipeg president Lloyd Axworthy, former dean of law at the University of Manitoba Harvey Secter and Havixbeck, the aforementioned councillor -- have considered that and are committed to upholding the park's integrity.

I believe them.

But what about decades from now, when there's another conservancy executive who feels the need to justify its salaries, or to put their own development mark on the park by taking more and more green space? In any event, the Assiniboine Park Conservancy appears here to stay for the next 50 years.

Meanwhile, I really only had one urgent message for Margaret Redmond. While I understand the focus on fundraising for the future, please don't neglect the present the way the city did. The grass is long in places it shouldn't be long, and the weeds in the wood chips are getting taller. If you're asking for tens of millions, remember our jewel of a park deserves to at least look like a million.

Especially when it's really priceless.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 23, 2012 B1