A new report on Toronto’s Parks and Recreation Division from the city’s auditor general suggests there is much room for improvement when it comes to maintaining park infrastructure.
The report looked at park inspections, non-capital repairs maintenance of various park assets and public complaints at the parks branch.
As part of their review, staff from the auditor’s office looked at 73 repair-related deficiencies identified by parks maintenance supervisors during regular inspections.
According to the report, work orders were created to deal with the problems within 100 days just a little more than half the time (56 per cent).
However for the rest of the deficiencies, the auditor found a number of issues, including work orders that weren’t created promptly or at all, challenges tracking deficiencies where responsibility was passed on to others, and other issues.
For 11 per cent of the problems, no work order at all was created.
In one case, a broken bench was flagged in early December and wasn’t repaired until late June.
The report found that there is currently no policy or procedure to set out how quickly work orders should be created after a problem has been identified.
In addition to tracking how problems were handled once they were identified, the auditor also looked at the quality of the inspections that were done, with the audit team visiting 40 parks themselves in December 2023.
“Although we used the same set of standards, there were differences in the number and nature of repair-related deficiencies we identified and those that were identified by Parks Branch maintenance inspections conducted during the same season,” the auditor found.
Some of the items noted by staff from the auditor’s office, but skipped over by parks staff included a picnic bench with holes burned through, rusty playground equipment and a park bench with most of the back missing.
The report also found that it was difficult to account for staff time in the department.
“While reviewing daily activity records together with work order records, we found that the extent to which staff documented their day varied,” the report found. “In some cases, discrepancies and gaps in records made it difficult to account for significant portions of staff time during their shift. In addition, many records we reviewed did not include vehicle information, which prevents the use of GPS data to verify reported locations.”
There is also no central system for tracking public complaints, the auditor’s report found.
The report is the second part of a review of the parks department by Toronto’s auditor general. The first report back in October shed light on day-to-day maintenance work activities and found that some crews were spending hours hanging out at coffee shops and other non-work-related sites while filling out logs saying they had been busy in city parks.
In an email, a spokesperson for the city said “work is already underway” to implement the recommendations in the report.
“Maintaining Toronto’s parks to the high standards residents rightly expect and responding to emergency repairs – which includes, for example assets broken through vandalism – is an ongoing challenge, but one we are meeting head-on,” said city spokesperson Russell Baker.
“The City has launched a Toronto-wide review of historical work orders, is conducting more site visits, developing new service benchmarks and working to integrate with 311 service. In addition, City staff are updating procedures for identifying, tracking and monitoring repairs and delivering updated training for frontline staff.”
Report comes as city budget hands department an increase
The latest report comes as Toronto City Council prepares to vote on Mayor Chow’s latest budget next week. That budget hands the parks department a 13 per cent increase, for a 2025 operating budget of $599 million.
That increase has raised eyebrows by some who say the department should not be getting more money when it has been caught underperforming.
“If the results of the auditor general’s report didn’t harm public trust, doubling down and throwing millions more at the problem certainly will,” Coun. Brad Bradford said in a social media post.
He pointed out that the department got more money to hire additional staff last year, and new hires are planned for 2026 as well.
“Do we need more park staff? Maybe. But I promise you, we need more accountability at city hall, and that would start with making sure our parks staff are actually in the parks, doing the job we’re paying them for before we go out and hire more.”
According to the mayor’s office, the extra money in the budget for the parks department will not be going to the underperforming parts of the department, but rather to hire 478 new staff to facilitate expanded programs.
“This Budget delivers on Mayor’s priorities to feed more kids and build a safer, caring and more affordable city. We are expanding hours for outdoor pools and feeding 31,000 kids through CampTO food programs,” Zeus Eden, a spokesperson for Mayor Chow, said in an email to CP24.
He said Chow’s office is, at the same time, committed to implementing the auditor general’s recommendations.
Those recommendations include better training for staff, as well as standardized practices.
The auditor said a new work order system is expected to roll out this year.
