Compromise reached over Central Tech’s sports fields

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The Ontario Municipal Board has approved a compromise over Central Technical School's sports field, helping smooth the way for three more domed, privately run facilities planned at Toronto schools.

The verbal approval came after a Monday board hearing to review a deal reached March 5 after a year and a half of wrangling over the site's privatization. The arrangement will be made official after the city signs off on three outstanding issues, including a traffic and parking plan accounting for the new stream of visitors to the Bathurst Street school on evenings and weekends.

The new plan came out of mediated talks between the City of Toronto, the Toronto District School Board, community associations and Razor Management Inc., which will run the sports facility. The dome will be less than half the size proposed in 2013, and local residents will be able to use the field 17 per cent of the time outside of school hours and the running track nearly all the time, free of charge. Students will have its full use for their own programs.

Central Tech is the third of six high schools the TDSB plans to set up with private "championship fields."

Two are already operating. The facility at Monarch Park Collegiate, near Danforth Avenue, is run by Razor Management, which rents the land for $1 a year. Nustadia Recreation Inc. operates the facility at Lakeshore Collegiate Institute in the Alderwood area.

With the OMB's final approval expected this spring, Central Tech's project could be finished by the fall, said Razor Management lawyer Mark Flowers. The fourth school to get a privately run field is West Humber Collegiate Institute in Rexdale. TDSB staff solicited proposals and are evaluating them, said school board spokesman Ryan Bird.

Newtonbrook Secondary School, near Yonge Street and Steeles Avenue, will go through the same process in the coming years, along with Lester B. Pearson Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, Mr. Bird said.

Razor Management is talking to a seventh TDSB school in the "midtown or North Toronto area" about building a private facility without a dome, company president Matthew Raizenne told The Globe and Mail. It is also negotiating with some Toronto private schools and other local school boards, he said.

"I think it's a sign of the times, in terms of the TDSB is under enormous fiscal restraints," he said. "We've seen municipalities and school boards across Canada call us looking to do similar projects and looking to copy what the TDSB started."

The TDSB began to talk publicly about the Central Tech project in 2013, after the school's field was found to have contaminated soil. However, Mr. Raizenne said he pitched the idea in 2012, a couple of years after successfully doing the same at Monarch Park.

Five of Central Tech's neighbours spoke against the deal at Monday's hearing, with some saying school property shouldn't be used for private profit. Diane Montgomery said that with the TDSB in dire financial straits, if anyone is earning from Central Tech's property, it should be the board. The TDSB has a backlog of repairs worth $3-billion.

Ms. Montgomery, a former banker, said that based on fees charged at Monarch Park, she believed Central Tech's facility would be worth tens of millions throughout Razor Management's 20-year agreement.

"Isn't that a shame that we can't figure out how to get capital costs together to revamp a field?" she said. "They're just going to hand it off so a private company can walk away with it."

Mr. Raizenne said Ms. Montgomery's estimate was "nowhere close,' and that $5-million or $6-million in initial investment would be followed by significant upkeep costs.

Mr. Bird said the TDSB was looking at potentially spending millions to decontaminate the field's soil. "This is one way we were able to address those concerns and get a state-of-the-art facility for our students," he said.