ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
3 MAY 2011
PRESIDENT’S REPORT FOR 2010-2011
This past year has been a very active one for OSCA and there is much to report. I will leave the details for the reports from the individual chairs of our committees, but we have finished the year with much accomplished and our finances and operations are in good order.
The biggest challenge this year and the one that has had the largest impact on our operations was the move back in to our newly renovated facilities at the Old Firehall Community Centre from Southminister United Church. Luckily this happened in June at the end of our regularly scheduled programming and at the start of our summer camps, so we had a bit of a chance to “test drive” the centre over the summer before the start of regular programming in September. Like every new building the renovated Firehall was not without its deficiencies and some of these did mean we had to juggle our programming arrangements, but all in all it went reasonably smoothly. All the fixes and touch ups were completed by the winter, although we still do not have permanent room signs installed! More importantly programme registrations have held up well and are growing with our transfer to the new facility, so our worries about encountering programme declines as a result of the move out, and back into, the Firehall have been unfounded and we have survived the transition in excellent shape. We can now focus on experimenting on what kinds of new programmes we can run in seeking to meet new local needs. One of the big programming decisions we face in the coming year will be whether to invest in a fitness centre in the large basement multipurpose room.
Our other major area of activity, working to defend the community’s interests on planning, traffic and development has been much more eventful and difficult. The issue of the design of infill housing projects and the proposed traffic management plan to improve the safety of Sunnyside Avenue are two key examples of issues in which the community has a significant stake and which have long term implications for the future development of our community. We have made much progress so far with respect to these two issues, but much work remains to bring them to a successful conclusion.
The biggest issue by far, however, has been the Lansdowne Park development which has taken up a good part of the Board’s and OSWatch’s time this year. While I will leave it to the OSWatch co-chairs to discuss in detail the issues on this file and where we came out, I think the settlement we reached with the City as a result of our joint challenge with the Glebe Community Association before the Ontario Municipal Board, has at least got us some useful improvements to the development and increased our ability to input on decisions on traffic management. We do remain, however, deeply troubled about the impact this development will have on traffic and the future commercial development on Bank Street, to say nothing of the inappropriate manner in which the development was tendered and managed.
The Lansdowne Park development raises significant governance issues at the City. The closed nature of this deal and the benefits granted to the developers, along with the obvious ways in which the goals of the Official Plan have been, in our view, ignored, create disturbing precedents for the future of development in the City core. The City is a commercial partner with a private developer, and also the agency that makes the regulatory decisions about whether the development meets the City’s planning framework and regulations. This is clearly a situation that makes it difficult for the City to balance its interests as a commercial partner in a development and its role to ensure, as a regulator, that developments meet the criteria of the public good as outlined in the City’s planning frameworks.
With respect to our own future to as an organization, we face a major set of issues with respect to our programming. We have had a successful partnership with the City for over 35 years, but that is about to change as the City wants to renegotiate the arrangement and establish a new relationship. I don’t think as a Board we will have any problem responding to the City’s need to be more explicit about the kind of partnership we have and about putting it into a written agreement. What will be more problematic I expect is the desire by the City to have us take on more responsibility in running the programmes, while they seek to reduce their staff resources at the community centre. Determining what is the right response in this regard, and more generally how we want to manage programming at the community centre will be a major task for the new Board to be elected at our AGM.
More generally, we will need to determine the level of engagement the Board needs to have with respect to the detailed running of its operations. Our various operations are becoming quite complex and time consuming as we need to deal across a multiple range of issues and operational decisions covering: a) a programming base that is growing and of significant financial complexity and size (over $400,000 annually now); b) a major oversight role on community development and traffic that is dealing with controversial and time consuming issues; c) the publisher of a very successful community newspaper with 50 pages a month and over 4500 circulation; and d) running a vibrant website that is winning accolades across the city. To manage all of this we need, as a Board, to spend more time providing direction and management guidance to the organization. This will mean as well that we will need to rely more on our staff to manage our day-to-day operations and that we will need to strengthen and probably increase the staff support that we have.
As a community based organization we are critically dependent on the support of volunteers in our community to ensure that we can function and deliver the services you need. I would, therefore, like to thank all the Board members for their hard work in helping to make 2010-11 another successful year. In particular, I would like to thank those Board members who are leaving this year after a number of years of service, including: John Calvert, especially for his work on the web committee and the web site; Brenda Lee for all her dedicated work that helped to make our special events, truly “special”; Donna Lordon for her work on the programme committee and on the public art committee for the renovated Firehall, and Peter Reinecke and Michael Honeywell-Dobbin who both had to leave due to growing family responsibilities. Thank you all for your support and hard work!
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our programming partners, the always dedicated City staff at the Firehall, Cathie Buchanan and Dinos Dafniotis, for their stalwart support. And last, but by no means least, I would like to thank Deirdre McQuillan, our Executive Director, without whose help and guidance literally nothing would ever get done!
It was a pleasure and an honour to serve as your President this year.