Poor old Harry Jerome. Not the Olympian, the recreation centre and park at 23rd and Lonsdale.
For the District of North Vancouver government, the Harry Jerome center was liability they couldn’t get rid of fast enough. To the City of North Vancouver, it was a development opportunity that came with obligations they’ve worked hard to shirk.
When the facility was built in 1966, ownership and liability for operating and maintenance costs were shared 50/50 between the city and district governments. In the mid-1990s, for reasons that aren’t clear, the city bought the district’s share as part of a complicated transaction that put a value on the liability for paying 50% of the costs of the facility at several million dollars.
The finance department at the district must have been very happy to see a liability turned into an asset through the magical accounting at City Hall. But what was the city thinking?
When the question was put to the city manager, who had been director of finance at the time the deal was done, his response was “to control development of the site.”
This makes no sense. The city already controlled any development on the site with its zoning and regulatory powers.
Was there a plan to sell the public land and rezone it for condo towers back then? I doubt it. More likely the city just wanted to get rid of one of the many, many friction points between it and the district and decided it was worth paying a couple million dollars to do it.
Whatever the reason, it bought 100% of the obligation to rebuild a facility where less than 50% of the users lived in the city. It was never going to seriously take on the redevelopment of the facility but it could never admit that publicly when in survey after survey North Vancouver residents put it at or near the top of their list of priorities for new public facilities.
After 20 years of kicking the can down the road, the city has been cornered into rebuilding the facility.
It has no interest meeting the needs of the whole North Vancouver community today. Its objective is to do as little as possible and make the towers as tall as they need to be to pay the bill for whatever is built.
The city is going ahead with a plan built around its own narrow self-interest before the pandemic as if nothing has changed. The community has been pummelled and reshaped in ways we haven’t begun to grasp. The city should stop. The existing facility should stay open.
There needs to be a reset. Not just to get perspective on what the community needs to build resilience for the future, but also to incorporate the North Vancouver-wide perspective of the original facility.
Guy Heywood immigrated to North Vancouver from eastern Canada in 1970. He has been elected to the board of education and city council, and was a volunteer on the North Vancouver Recreation Commission for seven years, during which time it completed a comprehensive review of all North Vancouver recreation facilities and made recommendations for their renewal.
