Council paves paradise to put up a parking lot

North Bay City ball parks are on the endangered species list as numbers continue to decline with the announcement at City Hall this week to pave over Leo Troy Field and part of Thompson Park.

The field, situated between the YMCA, Chippewa Creek and Memorial Gardens, has been decommissioned in favour of parking spaces for the expansions at the Gardens.

“We certainly knew from the onset that parking was part of the whole scenario,” says Councillor Dave Mendicino.

“I mean, you can’t expect to put four thousand people in that facility and not have a parking issue if we don’t expand,” he says.

While no public consultation was pressured, council announced and passed the destruction of this facility on the same evening while suggesting they were in contact with the users of the facility.

However, the only users consulted undoubtedly, were those paying the rent the field and perhaps not all of those taking part in using the space in the open to the public park.

Oddly, the term ‘park’ now, in the city, seems to encompass both those freely available for use, like the Kate Pace Way and Waterfront as well as private sport’s clubs like those at Steve Michel and the Garden’s that see tax relief exchanged with their financial supporters.

The question of where those who want to just use the park to throw the ball around go in the city has become a harder one to answer, especially within a central location, now with three fields in West Ferris shut down and now this one too at Thompson Park.

Numerous councillors, including the Mayor, made promises to not remove any more green spaces from the city following the Tweedsmuir controversy that shut down ball fields in central Ferris in favour of the pay only Steve Omischl Complex.


This promise obviously has not been kept as Councillor George Maroosis, the only one on council who voted against the motion, suggested the complex would cost approximately 1 million dollars to rebuild elsewhere in the city and that is without purchasing the large amount of land necessary, especially as central as Thompson Park.

Councillor Dave Mendicino cited that the field was only used seasonally three nights a week, however this is what’s reported by user groups and not by your average citizen who may use the park area and the ball field for exercise, walking, running, biking, playing unofficial sport’s games, and the list goes on.

Anyone who passes by the newly paved parking lot at the Gardens should surely know that it is nearly empty almost every night of the week with the exception of Friday nights or Sunday’s for a hockey game.

The addition of 700 seats to the Gardens facility is their justification for more parking but it is hard to believe that the city can maintain crowd densities of that sort for long periods of time and further examination would suggest perhaps a new facility might be more cost effective than destroying the complex and area around the Garden’s.

Oddly, this was not included in the 12 million dollar cost’s cited in the report about the expansion to the Gardens less than six month ago and equally frustrating, the funds for ‘decommissioning’ the million dollar baseball diamond that won’t’ be replaced, are going to come out of the taxpayers Capital Reserve Fund and not the budget for the Gardens renovations.