| There is a growing feeling of frustration on the part of many of the people living in Calgary’s core communities, who face an increase in property taxes at the same time that services in their neighbourhoods are being taken away or are under threat of closure.
This week the City of Calgary will begin sending out tax assessment notices to everyone in Calgary who owns property. Those residents living within four kilometres of the city centre could face increases of up to 25 per cent as their property values continue to gain value driven by the city’s hot real estate market.
Ald. Madeline King, whose ward includes a number of inner-city neighbourhoods, predicts the tax hike will be detrimental.
"It looks now as if in some of the inner-city we may have property tax increases this year of 20 to 25 per cent, and reductions in some of the suburbs," says King. "Many who worked to build value in inner city neighbourhoods will no longer be able to afford to live there."
At the same time that the city is collecting more money from inner-city communities, some of their educational, medical and recreational services are being cut or threatened as the city struggles to meet the needs of new communities. The school board recently approved the closure of five schools, including one in Parkdale and one in Tuxedo Park; the Calgary Health Region is closing medical labs in Mission and Bridgeland; the city is closing Georgina Thompson library at 14th Street and Northmount Drive N.W. and may consider closing three others; and although this year’s city council budget spared outdoor pools, most of which are located in inner-city neighbourhoods, they will no doubt be considered for closure again in the future.
One of the communities being directly confronted by the squeeze on the city’s core is Parkdale, which has found itself in the middle of the debate as the city sprawls ever further away from its centre. Situated near the University of Calgary and Foothills Hospital in the city’s northwest quadrant, Parkdale residents found out on March 18 that the trustees of the Calgary Board of Education had voted to close their school at the end of the 2003 school year.
"If you talk about the school being the heart of a community, then Parkdale is having a heart attack," says Neil Jobin, a resident of the neigbourhood who, together with wife Kim, has two boys attending the school and a daughter who is supposed to attend kindergarten there next year.
Although four other schools are also scheduled to close in June, Parkdale appears to be the only community intent on having that decision reversed. The school closure debate centres on what’s termed the "utilization rate" – CBE administration claims that Parkdale is using only 22 per cent of the school for the 143 CBE students who now attend the school, but a community group of more than 500 local residents, called Save Parkdale School, reports that the utilization rate is closer to 79 per cent.
The dispute between the CBE and Parkdale residents focuses on how the utilization figures are determined. In its estimate, the Save Parkdale School group includes space that has been leased out to outside organizations, including a before and after school program, a non-profit pre-school, space for CBE administrative offices and a senior citizens group.
"A few years ago the CBE told us to go and lease out the available space in the school and that’s what we did," says Jobin. "Now they are making a decision based strictly on the number of students."
Under current regulations set out by Alberta Infrastructure, a school jurisdiction is at "full utilization" when it reaches an overall utilization rate of 85 per cent. In order to get more money from the province to fund the construction of new schools, the CBE finds itself it the position of shutting down existing schools in Calgary’s core.
"The inner-city should be very worried about the chairman of the CBE," says Jobin. "I think the agenda for chairman (Gordon) Dirks is to build new schools in new areas."
Parkdale is not the only community in Calgary facing service cuts. On June 1, the Calgary Health Region plans to proceed with a plan to close two inner-city medical labs with an expected savings of $650,000 per year. The two labs, which operate under a partnership between the Calgary Health Region and MDS-Kasper, a for-profit medical services company, are among 24 labs under the umbrella of Calgary Laboratory Services.
According to Dr. Cam Waddell, chairman of the Calgary Laboratory Service management committee, the growth of Calgary has forced the CHR to examine what communities will have medical labs nearby.
"The region is growing and requires increasing resources to meet a standard of service delivery," says Waddell.
"The region is growing at the rate of about 26,000 people per year. We are obligated to provide service to all in the region and to do it in a manner that achieves a measure of equity while responding to the needs with the limited resources. At the moment there are some newer areas that receive no service – this demands a response from the CHR."
Both the Bridgeland and Mission labs service more than 2,400 patients per month, and concerns have been raised that the elderly and disabled populations in these communities will have difficulty accessing adequate laboratory services.
"As much as we’d like to, it is impossible to be all things to all people, so we try to address special issues as they arise," says Waddell, responding to the criticism.
The closure of the Bridgeland and Mission labs comes as CLS opens two new labs in the suburban communities of Douglasdale and Country Hills. Despite new housing projects and growing populations in both Bridgeland and Mission, people in those two neighbourhoods will now be expected to go to a CLS facility located at Gulf Canada Square downtown or wait for the mobile lab to visit their neighbourhood.
Dr. Byron Miller, director of Urban Studies at the University of Calgary, thinks that public institutions – such as the Calgary Board of Education and the Calgary Health Authority – should reconsider the lasting impact of decisions now being made about services in the city’s core.
"The inner-city is becoming denser with development, although they are losing services," says Miller. "In the short term the decisions may make sense, but for the long term there is a real concern for specific communities and specific services."
He questions the wisdom of the recent service cuts in Calgary’s core communities and says that politicians, school board trustees and other community leaders need to consider factors beyond population to guide their decisions. Instead, he supports the concept of "spatial justice" – a notion developed by David Harvey in his classic book Social Justice and the City (1973) – must be included when long-term planning occurs.
"Drawing on the philosopher John Rawls, Harvey argued that spatially uneven patterns of investment or service provision can be justified when they result in the allocation of additional services or opportunities to especially needy populations," Miller explains.
"He makes a normative argument that diverges from traditional notions of abstract economic efficiency.
"The point is that poor or needy populations require additional investments. Those investments are not made if public facilities and services are allocated without regard to the different needs of different populations – for example, facility location decision-making that follows a formula based only on the number of people in a given area."
Miller has some final advice for the residents of core communities who are seemingly being pitted against a swelling population that’s rapidly filling Calgary’s sprawling suburbs.
"Communities that are affected by the closure of important facilities obviously need to organize and lobby their school board, aldermen, provincial government, etc.," he says.
"While it’s important for policy makers and politicians to hear citizens’ concerns, to a certain extent they’ll simply expect complaints about closures. Lobbying efforts will likely have a better chance of success if citizens can make a compelling argument that there is a serious flaw in the closure decision-making process, such as a failure to take into account the special needs of disadvantaged populations, or failure to account for the long-run population growth of a neighbourhood, or an error in the way capacity utilization is calculated.
"These sorts of decisions are difficult to get reversed, but it does happen sometimes," Miller says.
That’s exactly what residents of Parkdale are counting on in their fight to keep their school open based on utilization rates. When community residents gather to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their school in April, they will be hoping that a last-minute plea made to the provincial government will win Parkdale Elementary a reprieve from closure. |
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