The Community Planning and Economic Development standing committee met Dec 12 and talked about lights in parks. This conversation dates back to 2021, when councillor Sam Austin put forward a motion asking for the city to come up with a plan to light municipal parks, because not having lights made people feel unsafe and not use HRM’s facilities. Since then, staff have spent the better part of two years getting community feedback and coming up with a lighting plan based on council’s priorities and community feedback.
At Thursday’s meeting, staff told the committee in practice that this means the city isn’t planning on throwing up lights for the sake of having lighting, but rather will take into account what light is needed. This should result in things like bright, functional lights being used for transportation and softer, fun lights to make a place fun to hang out. But staff will also take into consideration things like light pollution.
Staff also explained that this new plan will incorporate lighting in new park developments as a core requirement for creating new parks. Councillors on the planning committee expressed concerns that staff were focusing too much on new parks and not enough on the issues in the HRM today. Rest assured, said staff, fixing existing lighting is also a priority; they just focused on the new park processes during their presentation. In response to questions from councillors Patty Cuttell and Jean St-Amand, staff said that active transit connections are a priority for staff to fix.
Lighting on active transit connections is important but almost non-existent in the HRM. For example, here’s a screenshot of bike ride footage from the AAA bike network in the Dartmouth Commons by the disk golf course.
From the staff report presented Thursday, here’s what a similar path looks like in Lille, France, a city with better light planning.
During the debate, councillor Becky Kent told staff that she was excited by this plan, but historically, she also feels that when the municipality takes action on its vaunted plans, “when the rubber meets the road the rubber goes gooey.” Staff assured the committee that won’t happen this time, but time will tell as this committee sent the park lighting plan to council for approval sometime in the new year.
Also at this meeting, the city talked about pickleball courts at Castle Hill Park. The issue is that having popular amenities required for complete communities means that people will use them and have fun. When people are having fun building their community, they occasionally make noise, and pickleball is also a bit of a noisy sport. As a solution to the problem of having a functional, somewhat complete community that people are using, staff proposed scrapping these pickleball courts and moving them to the Canada Games Centre, which would make the community less complete and increase congestion as people have to drive more to play less pickleball.
Becky Kent absolutely dumped on this plan in her questions to staff for a lot of good reasons, like wondering why a district noise complaint was being jammed into our capital budget process, and why the city was considering spending a fair amount of capital money to decrease the number of pickleball courts when demand is so high. Her debate performance dropped off a bit later, when she told her peers that making a community less complete was fine because it’s normal in the HRM to have to drive to another community to do an activity, like for her constituency of Eastern Passage. Yes, this acceptance of driving is normal—and also a huge problem that the city is actively trying to prevent in multiple strategic plans that aim to create complete communities.
Procedurally, the decision to remove the courts happened via motion from the committee with two clauses. The first clause, to “remove the pickleball court markings and nets from the courts at Castle Hill Park” passed. At the buzzer the second clause was amended by councillor Trish Purdy (on behalf of St-Amand, who ran out of speaking time) to include noise dampening on current courts in the capital budget considerations. When this comes back for budget consideration, it should include options to create new joyous rectangles of asphalt with an acrylic surface out of the way of community life and options and standards on how to soundproof existing courts so that in the future, the city doesn’t have to remove elements of complete communities due to noise complaints.
Now that this motion has left committee it still has to be approved by council as a whole, and if that happens, it’s worth wondering what, if anything, it will accomplish. At first, removing the pickleball courts would work to reduce the noise that people in the neighbourhood complained to the city about. But one of the reasons tennis courts are quieter is their less frequent use relative to pickleball. Anyone who sees frequently or occasionally empty tennis courts will one day wonder what’s preventing them from using the courts for pickleball when no tennis players are there. They will go online and find one of many DIY guides to creating two pickleball courts out of one tennis court with portable $70 nets and some painter’s tape, and realize nothing is preventing them from using empty tennis courts for pickleball. Once one person does it, others will see it and realize they can do the same thing, too. Slowly at first, but eventually, like pickleball itself, more and more people will start doing it, and we’ll be right back where we started. The last council would have chosen to remove the pickleball courts from Castle Hill Park and have this debate again in a few years; here’s to hoping council does better than this committee and crafts policy that considers human nature and goes with something like soundproofing instead of removal.
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.
Use the space for a few affordable tiny homes to help solve our lack of housing crisis.