By Jim Young, chair of Partnering Aldershot
Opinion.
Burlington City Council recently adopted a new Recreation Plan, its “guiding document for the future development of Park, Recreation, and Cultural Facilities”for the next five years. The plan provides additions and improvements to facilities in every city ward except Ward 1, where Aldershot is already the least served of all Burlington’s six wards.
The plan recommends additions to Sherwood Forest Community Centre, new buildings at Central Park, modernization of Tansley Wood Community Centre, additional or upgraded facilities at Brant Hills, Mountainside, Haber, and even additions at the not-yet-completed Robert Bateman Community Centre. Plans include a community theatre, four additional gymnasiums, a new twin pad arena, community program spaces, three to four multi-purpose community rooms, five to six music rooms, and the city’s first indoor walking track at Skyway Arena. Not one Aldershot facility is slated for improvement, and a unanimous vote by council to adopt the plan ensures this lack of west-end facilities will not improve over the next five years.
The plan is yet another disappointment for west-end residents who have long felt overlooked by city investment in recreational programs and facilities, an oversight this plan might have addressed, yet failed to do so. In its delegation to Committee of the Whole, Partnering Aldershot (PA) asked: “Why, once again, is Aldershot excluded from city recreation investment plans?” Our pleas were rejected in a unanimous vote of council to adopt the plan.
The plan talks of “Thriving Neighbourhoods, Community Needs, Right to Play & Sense of Belonging.”The recreational reality in Aldershot is very different. Allow me to compare the two.
Burlington’s current recreation facilities include 10 ice rinks; six swimming pools, 46 multi-purpose spaces, and including 30 community program rooms, two auditoriums, six small meeting rooms, five music rooms, and three “hub” rooms. The plan provides for additions and improvements to all of them.
Aldershot has a somewhat renovated 1970s-era arena, a 1960s-era high school pool, and two small rooms, neither of which is currently staffed or running community programs. We have no multi-purpose spaces, no music rooms, no gymnasium, no indoor walking track, no auditorium or community theatre, and no twin-pad arena. The plan offers no remedy for these shortcomings.
Burlington is mandated by provincial, regional, and municipal housing targets to grow, adding 29,000 housing units by 2031, and many more than that are in the pre-planning and planning process. Most of this intensification will be at Burlington’s Major Transit Station Areas. Depending on which developments get approved, the area around Aldershot GO will see between 35% and 50% of that growth, with close to 11,000 units under planning consideration and close to 1,500 units already built along Plains Road and around Masonry Court. Residents had hoped that additions to city recreation facilities might have reflected Aldershot’s recent and proposed population explosion, yet in the plan’s 14 pages of recommended additions and improvements, Aldershot is not mentioned once.
Despite disappointment in council’s adoption of a recreation plan that provides nothing for the west end, Partnering Aldershot continues to engage with recreation staff to provide seniors’ programming in Aldershot starting in September this year. Local churches and Partnering Aldershot had urged the city to utilize church halls for community programming, but while Burlington rents church halls for council and planning events, city policy prohibits much-needed community programming in these facilities.
Given no city investment in west-end recreation facilities for the next five years, PA will continue to engage in the evolving proposal for a mixed-use, residential, commercial, hospitality, community, sports, and public space development at 1200 King Rd., Aldershot’s last hope for community facilities to meet the needs of its ever-growing population. Sadly, this is still more than five years away.
Note from the writer: Facilities at Burlington Public Library branches are specifically excluded from the plan and from the discussion In this article. A “hub room” is not defined anywhere in the plan but rest assured, Aldershot does not have one.
