Park board commissioners legally bound to allow FIFA training sites, despite reservations

What happened: The Vancouver park board voted to authorize $25 million in contracts to build two FIFA training sites at Killarney and Memorial South parks. A majority of commissioners and over a dozen public speakers spoke about their discomfort and opposition to the site at Memorial South, while no one expressed concern about the Killarney project. 

• The board’s decision to move forward with work at Memorial South was begrudging, to say the least, with commissioners Marie-Claire Howard and Jas Virdi voting in favour while the five other commissioners abstained from the vote. 

Ultimately, commissioners were told they had little choice in the matter, due to an agreement they made early in their term.     

Word of the day: Irrevocable – not able to be changed or reversed; final. It’s how a delegation from the city, which included city manager Paul Mochrie, and park board staff, described the park board’s training site agreements with FIFA. 

In March 2022, the previous park board signed four of these irrevocable agreements with FIFA, offering to build and host training sites that met FIFA’s standards at Killarney, Strathcona, Jericho, and Hastings parks, from which FIFA got to choose two, according to private park board documents which were recently made public. 

• In October 2023, the current board, then newly-appointed, signed a fifth binding agreement to offer Memorial South Park as a training site, at FIFA’s request. 

If the park board doesn’t deliver the fields with the agreed-upon amenities by December 2025, FIFA has the contractual right to hire their own contractors to complete the work and require the park board to pay their costs. The park board could also be liable for damages in court, staff said. 

Losing control in that way “would arguably be the worst case scenario for the taxpayer,” city legal staff told commissioners at Monday’s meeting, given that FIFA’s execution of the project would likely cost more. 

FIFA’s bare necessities: Park board commissioner Laura Christensen said the key part that bothered her was, when the irrevocable deal for FIFA’s use of Memorial South was being approved by the board, there were discussions about money potentially being available for legacy upgrades. The reality that that funding would just cover bare necessities was only made clear quite recently, Christensen said. 

• The $25 million for the two training site projects, drawn from a separate World Cup budget, will only pay for “pure requirements” – that is, the park board’s contractual requirement to meet FIFA’s standards – and doesn’t allocate money for any additional upgrades in the parks.  

“I’m uncomfortable being in a situation where I’m being asked to make a decision and I’m not fully informed… the expected legacy didn’t match up. I was expecting those assets to be more generous… unfortunately I feel like my hand is being forced,” park board commissioner Brennan Bastyovanszky said prior to Monday’s vote.  

A slow trickle of info: “I don’t feel like I live in a democracy at this point,” Cindy Heinrichs told commissioners and staff at the meeting. Heinrich, a longtime resident of the neighbourhood, leads a group of locals petitioning against the closure and FIFA’s use of the field. “You didn’t ask us anything and, even worse, you didn’t even tell us anything,” Heinrichs said. 

City council had planned to hold a public meeting “to report and present implication analysis of being a [FIFA] 2026 Host City (costs, benefits, risks, etc.)” in March, 2022. However, that never went ahead due to “concerns about disclosure of highly sensitive and confidential information,” a city staff member said, according to Bob Mackin’s reporting in theBreaker. 

• The park board and city knew which parks had been selected for training sites by FIFA in October 2023, but didn’t release that information publicly until nine months later, in July 2024. 

The first public information session for the Memorial South project was held on November 30th. Park board staff and contractors disclosed new information including a detailed breakdown of which trees would be removed and the idea that the new irrigation would feed rainwater into the pond on the other side of the park. 

The recently released park board documents revealed the field, oval running track, and surrounding area will be closed for approximately two years. The site will also be completely blocked from public view, with no public access to watch training sessions during the tournament.  

What we heard: People have been playing organized cricket at Memorial South Park since at least 1960 and will likely never play there again, Iain Dixon told Vancity Lookout. Dixon is the vice president of Meraloma’s Cricket Club and also sits on the board of the BC Mainland Cricket League (BCMCL).

• It would make “no sense whatsoever” to reinstall the asphalt slab that cricket requires in the middle of the new soccer field, Dixon explained. 

Instead, BCMCL is asking the park board to allow Balaclava Park in Kits to be used for cricket. Tiina Mack, the park board’s director of planning, said the cricket pitch would be replaced somewhere, but did not provide specifics on location or confirm cricket would not return to Memorial South. 

“[The FIFA fields] had to be somewhere. We would rather it wasn't one of our cricket grounds. [But] a decision had to be made to put them somewhere,” Dixon said.

• There are five other cricket pitches in Vancouver. Clubs typically pay for necessary infrastructure, with upfront costs around $15,000-20,000 according to Dixon. 

Track users: The board heard from other track and field users Monday including Ian Coccimiglio, who has been the track and field coach at nearby David Thompson Secondary for 14 years. 

Coincidentally, 2010 was also the year that Memorial South’s track became rubberized, making it the only rubber track in South Vancouver, Coccimiglio noted. 

The rubber track is an important and necessary feature for track athletes, and having the only one in South Van closed for about two years will impact development and training for all sorts of local runners and athletes, Coccimiglio said. 

• Dive Deeper: Read about the importance of the track, and much more, in our exclusive report from November, highlighting conversations with neighbours, park users, and commissioners. 

Amendments: Commissioners Laura Christensen and Tom Digby were successfully able to add extra considerations to the contract approval. Digby inserted an amendment asking city manager Paul Mochrie to determine if there is any possibility of using the National Soccer Development Centre at UBC as an alternative training site, delaying the tree removals until that determination was made. 

• It seems unlikely this will go anywhere, for a number of reasons. A FIFA Vancouver spokesperson previously told Vancity Lookout that UBC was considered but ultimately not chosen for a variety of reasons, while Mochrie told commissioners, “there’s nothing I can say,” that would change the board’s legal requirements. 

Looking forward, Christensen added a clause for park board staff to conduct public engagement with Memorial South Park users and neighbours on what new amenities they’d like to have in the park, prioritize those in the next capital budget (2027-2030), and ask city council for additional funding to do that.

Last word: Ultimately, the public and many of the commissioners appeared dejected with the outcome, with these speculative amendments attempting to soothe the sting of a seemingly foregone conclusion.