Park board, city council eye big investments for Vancouver community facilities

It’s become common knowledge that most of Vancouver’s recreation facilities are in dire need of renewal. Community centres, pools, and ice rinks are often at capacity and in bad condition, delivering inadequate service to Vancouverites who rely on these spaces for community recreation, public space, and programs. 

Significant structural failures at Kits Pool, the Vancouver Aquatic Centre, and Brittania ice rink are some of the best-known examples of a beleaguered network of community facilities — nearly three-quarters of which were rated as being in “poor” or “very poor” condition, according to an assessment by the city in 2022.

A 2025 audit of recreation facilities painted a sombre picture of the city deferring much-needed renewals in favour of band-aid solutions, leading to unexpected closures and reduced service. “The City has been hard pressed to fund the maintenance of its existing facilities, let alone create more,” Auditor General Mike MacDonell wrote. 

“Residents are absolutely desperate to get a proper investment in parks and recreation … they can't get kids in lessons, they can't access facilities because they’re closed or over capacity,” park board commissioner Brennan Bastyovanszky, who is running for re-election with the upstart Vancouver Liberal Party, told Vancity Lookout. 

Bastyovanszky said that desperation was what motivated him to submit a request to the city, which controls park board funding, to invest $1.43 billion in parks and recreation over the next four years through the city’s 2027-2030 capital plan. 

That big number – which would be over two-and-a-half times more than the $562.5 million the park board received under the current capital plan – would pay for a lengthy list of park board projects, including $400 million to renew the Hastings, Renfrew, and Kensington community centres, $300 million for a renewal of Brittania Community Centre, including the rink, pool, skatepark, and community spaces, and $250 million for aquatic facilities, including a Kits Pool replacement.

“This is to realign the infrastructure to make the city livable,” Bastyovanszky said, especially given the city’s push to add more housing density throughout the city.

Bastyovanszky’s motion got approval at the park board, with support from fellow commissioners Scott Jensen, who is also running for re-election with the Vancouver Liberals, and board chair Tom Digby. However, commissioner Laura Christensen, who is typically aligned with those three, abstained from the vote, telling Vancity Lookout the request is a “wish list” that’s “detached from the fiscal realities of Vancouver’s budget.”

“It's one thing to advocate for more money … to say this is how much money we should have to meet those renewal targets … but to just say we want everything, without recognizing that park board is just one portion of the whole city and that a lot of other areas need money as well – I think it's just unrealistic,” Christensen said. 

“You look across all the other departments in the city, like engineering, they're facing the same problems of crumbling infrastructure. Park board is not unique in its situation of being underfunded, historically, and needing renewals,” she explained. 

Bastyovanszky disagreed, saying the funding request is realistic if the city is willing to borrow a large sum to invest in these long-term assets. While city revenues, developer contributions, and funds from other organizations and levels of government all go toward paying for the city’s capital plan, borrowing is a key way to fund major infrastructure investments.

Borrowing that amount of money for capital projects is “at the limits of the realm of possibility, but not completely outside [it],” according to Stewart Prest, a political science professor at UBC. 

“There is a trade-off between thinking small and trying to maintain balanced budgets – perhaps under-spending on the services and the structural investments that a growing city like Vancouver needs — and thinking ambitiously, perhaps too ambitiously, and taking on more than the city can sustain,” Prest explained to Vancity Lookout.

Elected officials “making the case for why they have the right level of ambition is a core element of city planning,” he added. 

Under the Vancouver Charter, the city can’t run a deficit in its annual operating budget, but it can take out loans for projects as part of its capital plan. However, local voters must give the city permission, through a successful referendum, to borrow money for those projects. Those referendums typically take place at the same time as elections. For example, in 2022, voters approved the city borrowing $495 million for various infrastructure projects.

During a speech at the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade on Wednesday, Mayor Ken Sim put forward the idea of dedicating $400 million in the next capital plan “towards rebuilding and renovating five of Vancouver’s community centres.” 

While it’s a much smaller number than what the park board is putting forward, Sim’s announcement carries more weight because he and his ABC majority, unlike the park board, have the power to put these projects on the ballot for voter consideration.

The Mayor’s office declined to share specific information about which community centres would be prioritized and how that would be funded, saying more details will be made public next week as part of a motion on strategic priorities for the capital plan coming to council on April 22. 

It’s a rare situation where the ABC majority seems to be aligned with the park board, at least on funding for the city’s community centres. Bastyovanszky told Vancity Lookout that he’d be in conversation with several city councillors, whom he declined to name, about the possibility of securing the funding the park board has asked for. “If I thought that we weren't able to afford this, I wouldn't have brought it forward,” he said. 

OneCity mayoral candidate William Azaroff told Vancity Lookout he’s in favour of ABC’s proposed community centre investments, a stance that seems to be somewhat at odds with OneCity’s recent public statement describing ABC’s proposed funding as a “$400 million slush fund to pull the wool over the eyes of Vancouverites.” 

Asked to clarify, Azaroff explained that OneCity sees it as “a really deeply cynical and politically motivated announcement … they've had three and a half years to invest in our communities.” While there have been some opportunities for Sim and ABC to adjust project funding during their term – the city actually moved more than $30 million away from the planned renewal and expansion of the RayCam Co-operative Centre in 2024 – the current capital plan was largely set by the previous council. This summer will be ABC’s first chance to set a capital plan with its own priorities. 

In terms of how those investments should be funded, Azaroff said taking on loans is part of the solution, but he wasn’t prepared to quantify how much they should be relied on. 

The other notable announcement Sim made in his Board of Trade speech was to promise that, if re-elected, he would push for a second year of no property tax increases. While that will likely be a popular position with many property owners, it would further reduce the city’s ability to pay for infrastructure investments with its own revenue, making it likely that a greater portion of any investments would need to be funded through voter-approved borrowing. 

OneCity called the promise of another tax freeze “flagrant mismanagement [which] puts Vancouver at risk of going over a fiscal cliff in a time of crisis.”

Speaking to the park board’s $1.43 billion funding ask, Azaroff said the infrastructure investments it proposes are really important but need to be viewed with a critical eye. “It seems like they sort of included everyone's pet projects, so I think there's some scrutiny that needs to be put on that,” he said. 

While many details still need to be determined and made public, and the hurdle of public approval cleared in the Fall, it does seem that elected officials and candidates are in general agreement that now is the time for a significant investment in Vancouver’s civic assets. But how ambitious those should be – and how to pay for them – still leaves plenty of room for debate. 

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