Lake Ontario Park

THE FINAL CONCEPT PLAN for Lake Ontario Park has been posted in the City's Arts, Recreation & Community Policies Committee agenda for its October 22 meeting.

THREE NOTABLE ITEMS on City Council's agenda for the meeting of October 6 2009.

1. Read the Recreation & Leisure Services Department 2009-2010 Priorities and observe the degree to which waterfront just isn't on the radar. What's waterfront-related is either stalled, or token.

   Waterfront items include:

   • "Design of the Breakwater beach area (2010)". The Mass Swim, the culmination of public disgust over how our waterfront is marginalized, was held July 22nd 2008.
   • "Window repairs at the Richardson Beach Bath house (2010)". That's routine deferred maintenance, long overdue, masquerading as a listable project serving the illusion of serving the waterfront.
   • "Final approval to the Lake Ontario Park Plan (November 2009)", the proximity of which signals that public outcry (also here) over the way overblown concept plan will be mostly ignored.
   • "Marinas Business Plan (February 2010)" which promises to be an eyeball-roller given all the evident shenanigans (and here) leading to that.
   • "Waterfront Plan (2010)", whatever that is. This is bundled with, and listed after items like "New outdoor rinks construction policy (2010)", "healthy food options (2010)", "Community gardens policy (November 200)", and "Sustainable food strategy (2010)". That's your Harvey-Rosen-era Kingston waterfront, right there.
2. The City gets, gratis, a narrow-strip of adjacent land to allow widening the waterfront pathway between the West Street launch ramp and Simcoe Street. That's courtesy of Holmstead Land Holdings which, rest assured, will get-that-back in spades later.
3. The 2006 agreement with the Kingston Brewing Company to operate 6 Clarence Street as a service centre for Confederation Basin Marina boaters is renewed and sweetened through 2012.

MIXED REACTION at last night's Lake Ontario Park public meeting, from The Whig.

THE LAKE ONTARIO PARK RAILROAD rolls-on at a September 16th public meeting.

By now the recurring pattern is plainly evident:

1. Defer maintenance of a municipal asset for decades.
2. Spend megabucks on an one-time, ostentatious remediation plan.
3. Repeat.

Previously: Paving paradise, to put up a 'fake' park from July, and How to run a railroad from last March.

PAVING PARADISE, TO PUT UP A ‘FAKE’ PARK is an interesting letter in the recent Kingston This Week about the proposed extensive Lake Ontario Park re-vamp.

THE FINAL CONCEPT PLAN FOR LAKE ONTARIO PARK has been released by the City.

More here.

LEMOINE POINT CONSERVATION AREA now has a Wikipedia page, thanks to the initiative of a user named SoftwareSimian, who created the page yesterday. This is great!

Whenever you Google something, have you noticed that Wikipedia always ranks very high in the list of returned results?

Wikipedia is highly authoritative in the eyes of Google. This means that if a Google search returns a million results, Wikipedia's entry is typically in the top-10, sometimes top-5.

Kingston's Waterfront continues to have a Wikipedia deficit. That needs to change.

If you care about something, document it. That, in and of itself, makes it harder for the clueless among us to mess with it.

ART PARK and ENVIRO PARK concept plans for Lake Ontario Park have (finally) been posted by the City.

See the City's project page. For now it's just diagrams, no details.

HOW TO RUN A RAILROAD. All aboard! The Lake Ontario Park express.

First you have a public meeting and THEN you post proposal details online.

This guarantees minimum buzz prior to the meeting, a low turnout, and uninformed attendees at the meeting itself.

All the better to ram-through pre-conceived plans with a minimum disruption like actual input.

This is how the people who have fucked-up our waterfront operate.

Related: The City's token 4-question online LOP survey from last January.

PUBLIC ASKED FOR INPUT on Lake Ontario Park's master plan.

There's a token 4-question online survey, and two public meetings are planned, the first on January 21 and the second on March 25, 2009. The January 21 public meeting is between 7 to 9 PM at the Invista Centre.

Let's hope this isn't just public consultation theatre like we've seen with so many City and island projects in the recent past.

THE 25-PAGE REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL for consulting services for the development of a master plan for Lake Ontario Park has been released by the City.

The RFP is due Wednesday, August 13, 2008.

Related:

• Looking for a plan from March 23rd of this year. Evidently there hasn't been much progress in this dossier over the past 4-months.
• $8.5 million budgeted through 2013 for Lake Ontario Park upgrades, from June 16 2008.
• Lake Ontario Waterkeeper's Beach Report 2007 mentions "Lake Ontario Municipal Beach" (sic), from October 2007, based on a visit in July 31st, 2006.
• $30,000 budgeted for the Lake Ontario Park Master Plan from March 20, 2007. That's been boosted to a maximum of $125,000 in the RFP.
• Three LOP concept plans from June 30th, 2006. Two years ago already.
• Also, the Lake Ontario Park article on Wikipedia needs work.

ANOTHER SUMMER OF AD-HOC KINGSTON BEACH REPORTS, it seems.

The Health Unit Communications Officer, Mr Justin Chenier, has made it very clear: there are currently no plans for a link, nevermind a dedicated page, about local beaches on the Health Unit website. Don't even think about it; it's not on the radar.

If you need the latest on local beaches, you'll need to root through the Health Unit's news dispatches, essentially fending for yourself, interpreting the fragmentary disclosures therein. Assuming you find it at all.

Also, this Health Unit declares beaches unsafe, but does not explicitly declare them safe again. So faced with, say, a 5-day old beach report, what should one conclude?

Alternately, you could consult this City of Kingston web page (found via "Residents", then "Environment", not "Recreation") which provides a list, but with no date-of-update and no other cues, so information freshness is always in doubt here. This same page showed Lake Ontario Park Beach and Rotary Park Beach closed for most of the winter, a sign that keeping this list fresh certainly wasn't any sort of priority last year.

The City web page currently links to the Health Unit's old website address (http://www.healthunit.on.ca/programs/environ.html) which, like all references to the old website, redirects to the current home page where, assuming the beach news hasn't scrolled-off, you might find more beach-related information in the 4-item news-area found there.

This is all very sloppy. There's no possible excuse for this.

Now look at Toronto: they do it better. Toronto has:

• several dedicated pages about its beaches,
• detailed recent, and not-so-recent, quantitative data on specific sampling results,
• the location of beach warning signs so you'll know where to look,
• a daily beach overview of the region including a general interactive map leading to beach-specific maps, and
• a hotline anyone can call, (416-392-7161), to hear a recording of the very latest water quality conditions.

Here in Kingston, don't even think of making suggestions for the Health Unit website: they are evidently only interested in hearing themselves tell you how great the KFL&A Health Unit website is. You'll be talking with God's gift to local beach users. That's got to change.

Related:

• Health Unit snoozing from a year ago, June 23 2007.
• Finally we have an online beach report, from August 24th 2007. We've made zero forward progress in the 10-months since.
• A swimmable Lake Ontario (June 5, 2008), an excellent, recent, and directly-related podcast from Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.

All this is emblematic of how much our municipal and local bureaucracies, at every level, need a swift kick-in-the-butt when it comes to respecting our waterfront and its users.

See also: You snooze, you lose -- Kingston's disappearing waterfront. This beach-report situation is more evidence that some nine-to-fivers among us are evidently auto-stumbling through their waterfront-related dossiers.

ROTATED AND UNREADABLE is Major Capital Projects (Schedule B) in this week's Council documents. Inside, zooming-in and squinting, are the following tallies:

If you could, how would you allocate $30 over 5-years? How much of that would you put on the Tett Centre? Lake Ontario Park? Waterfront acquisition?

Updated: The city cleaned-up and re-posted the document, and readability is much improved.

LAKE ONTARIO PARK CLEANUP, by the Friends of Lake Ontario Park and all interested volunteers, is planned for this Friday (April 25) from 1 to 4 pm.

It's 37 acres, and it's worth doing.

Bags and gloves are available at the 'long house' anytime after 1 pm.

Related: Lake Ontario Park, looking for a plan from March 23rd.

LAKE ONTARIO PARK MASTER PLAN - TERMS OF REFERENCE is a 7-page report just released by the City staff for a committee meeting later this week.

The Terms of Reference for the next phase are focused on finding a viable way of putting in place the vision and planning principles agreed to in the visioning exercise. The Phase I Planning Study achieved its goal of reaching a consensus on the future of Lake Ontario Park. Phase 2 of the park redevelopment process has three objectives which are:

• To develop and recommend a multi-year strategic direction and plan for the revitalization and rejuvenation of the park as a public community facility;
• To ensure ongoing and inclusive community consultation throughout the development of the plan and the related implementation strategy; and
• To develop and recommend a long-term financing and budget strategy for the capital construction and operating costs necessary to implement and maintain the recommended development plan.

Totally unlike, say, City marinas.

Have you noticed how Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, dominates Google search result pages?

For example, consider these Google search results:

• Google "Kingston, Ontario", and Wikipedia ranks as the first entry after the City of Kingston's website, and ahead of all the websites belonging to Queen's, Fort Henry, CFB Kingston, KEDCO, all the hotels, all real-estate brokers, the Chamber of Commerce, all the other directories, everthing.
• Googling Queens University returns Wikipedia as the first Canadian non-Queen's entry.
• Googling Royal Military College: Wikipedia ranks second behind the RMC website.
• Wolfe Island returns Wikipedia in fifth spot, but still ahead of 312,995 others.

Like it or not, Google considers Wikipedia as authoritative. When someone wants a general overview of something notable, Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start.

It is therefore in our interest to ensure that Wikipedia articles about notable things in our midst exist, are rich and accurate, are properly categorized and linked, and thereafter are watched in perpetuity.

Our waterfront is woefully underrepresented in Wikipedia. That needs to change.

So pick a notable piece of your physical environment and see to documenting it in Wikipedia. It won't cost you a dime, and it will get viewed far more, and be trusted far more, than almost anything else you can do on the web, at any price.

BEACH REPORT 2007 is a 36-page PDF just released by Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.

Seven of the Kingston-area beaches are covered in the report:

• Richardson Beach (they call it "Murney Tower")
• Grass Creek
• Rotary Park, (incorrectly identified as part of "Collins Bay Marina")
• Lemoine Beach
• Arrowhead Beach
• Crerar Beach
• Everitt Beach
• Lake Ontario Park (they call it "Lake Ontario Municipal Beach")

Oddly Big Sandy Bay, one of Lake Ontrario's most beautiful beaches, isn't included.

Many of the observations arise from the abject neglect by our municipality for our beaches.

That's not the only beach-related thing that's neglected by the City.

On August 24th we were pleased to report that FINALLY WE HAVE AN ONLINE BEACH REPORT.

But our fears were well-founded: as it turns out, that online beach report is just another web page the City is unable to properly maintain. There has been no update in the two months since August 24th when the information was first posted.

FINALLY WE HAVE AN ONLINE BEACH REPORT.

It's on the City of Kingston website, under "Residents", then "Recreation". At the moment apparently two beaches, Lake Ontario Park and Rotary Park, are posted.

The information is not date-stamped, so you'll have no idea of information freshness. Let's hope this isn't another web page the city has no time to maintain.

LAKE ONTARIO PARK BEACH is closed due to high E. coli levels (from The Whig Standard).

The Health Unit website? Lame.

We have more on Kingston's rock and sand beaches

There are WATERFRONT ITEMS IN THE 2007-08 MUNICIPAL CAPITAL BUDGET which should be approved tonight.

• Under Culture and Rec
  • $30,000 for a Beaches Study
  • $30,000 for Beaches Imprementation
  • $50,000 for Cycling and Pathways Implementation
  • $30,000 for the Lake Ontario Park Master Plan
• Under Marinas
  • $80,000 for Confederation Basin-Power upgrade on E and F docks. E-F docks are on your immediate right, jutting towards the Ramada, as you walk onto the main dock.
  • $50,000 for POH Break Wall floating extenston
  • $40,000 for POH Accessibility Upgrades
  • $30,000 for POH, for the facings of D and E docks. D and E docks are the two closest to the grassy playground area.
  • $10,000 POH launch ramp upgrades
  • $40,000 for Confederation Basin-Marinas Business Case Study (?!)
• Under Planning and Development
  • $75,000 for a Waterfront Strategy
• Under Properties
  • $105,000 for various at the Marine Museum (roof, chimney)

The Friends of Lake Ontario Park have a website. Therein you can see PDFs of Concept 1, Concept 2, and Concept 3 proposals from the Lake Ontario Park Revitalization Study prepared by Corush Sunderland Wright Ltd.