An advert in this week’s local newspaper states the City of Toronto is holding some Town Hall Meetings in this coming two weeks as part of the process to develop a Parks and Recreation Facilities Master Plan for the coming 20 years. The opening passage states: “The City of Toronto is developing a 20-year plan to guide decision making and investment in parks and recreation facilities and would like to hear from you.”

This should be of interest to those involved in leading the charge for cricket within the City of Toronto. Certainly it provides the opportunity to share with some other sports some fairly basic needs at some parks to enhance sports infrastructure through the provision or improvement in changing facilities/wash rooms and improving the quality of grass playing fields.

Various grounds shared as sometimes cricket outfields and sometimes soccer/rugby/football/frisbee pitches could be improved by making the grounds level or closer to being flat than at present, and improving drainage. A better quality of grass could be introduced when such improvements took place.

The schedule for the coming week’s meetings, each targeting part of the overall city, is:

Toronto & East York: Tuesday, February 23 from 7-9 pm at Wallace Emmerson CC, 1260 Dufferin Street

Scarborough: Wednesday, February 24 from 7-9pm at Warden Hilltop CC, 25 Mendelssohn St

Etobicoke-York: Wednesday, March 2 from 7-9pm at Etobicoke Olympium, 590 Rathburn Rd

North York: Thursday, March 3 from 7-9pm at Edithvale CC, 131 Finch Ave West.

You (!) can hit the internet world to discover “More information: visit Toronto.ca/parks/facilitiesplan”.

Back on May 14, 2009 Toronto Parks and Recreation hosted a two-hour discussion aimed at setting up a Cricket Resource Group that would work in conjunction with the Access and Diversity Unit to help promote and develop cricket in the City of Toronto.

The development of the Thackary Park cricket ground and nets project for North Etobicoke was already on the City’s horizons but needed to raise an additional $250,000 by September 2009 and a further $1.2 million for the second phase of the project.

Hopefully some of the local leagues and other cricket organizations will have already been aware of these upcoming meetings and will have developed and drawn up some rough estimates of costs for infrastructure improvements that could be made to City facilities. Some of these ideas, hopefully, will have been shared with other users of grounds where cricket is played alongside the likes of soccer, rugby and ultimate frisbee.

So the City of Toronto is providing an opportunity for thoughtful insight into infrastructure development. An opportunity that the local cricket community should not miss, in my opinion.

Eddie Norfolk