A history of advocacy ...for black basketball players

Fourteen Years Later, the Answer Isn't Repair — It's Removal

On July 13, 2012, I wrote to then-Councillor Peter Clark's office about the basketball court at McArthur and North River Road. The asphalt was cracked and uneven. A backboard had been removed during an ash tree purge and never replaced. There was no lighting for evening play, even though the tennis courts nearby had it. And the court wasn't even listed on the City's own facilities map.

Clark's office forwarded it to staff "for their review and action." That was the whole response.

That court — Riveraine Park — got fixed. Today it's one of the better-maintained courts proximal to the ward: good surface, working lights, a genuine community amenity. I won't claim my letter is the reason — city works don't come with attribution — but I will say this: the exact problems I raised in 2012 are the problems that eventually got solved. Someone paid attention while repair was still cheaper than replacement, and the resources followed. That's the system working the way it's supposed to.

Bathgate Park is the other side of that same 2012 letter — same category of ask, same ward, same kind of neglect, just a different location and a much longer runway to a much worse outcome.

What's on the table now

This month, Councillor Rawlson King's office opened public consultation on a Bathgate Park renewal plan. The concept includes reforestation, renewal of the park's central paved pathway — and removal of the basketball court, because it has deteriorated too far to be worth saving.

To be clear about what that means: this isn't a "no action" story. There's an active plan, a concept design, an in-person session, and a survey that runs to July 21. That's more process than the 2012 letter to Clark ever got. But the plan on the table doesn't fix the court. It takes it out.

A facility that could have been resurfaced and relit for a fraction of the cost of a full park redesign has instead been allowed to deteriorate long enough that removal became the only responsible option left. That's not a failure of any one meeting or one survey. It's what deferred maintenance looks like when nobody owns the timeline.

Two courts, one lesson

I'm not interested in relitigating who specifically dropped which ball over fourteen years. KING has been councillor for seven of them. Councillors should change, staff change, budgets change. What doesn't change is the pattern: minor infrastructure complaints in this ward get logged, forwarded, and left to compound until the cheapest fix is no longer repair but replacement or removal. Riveraine happened to land on the right side of that clock. Bathgate didn't.

If we want a different outcome the next time a resident flags a cracked court or a missing backboard, the fix isn't a better park design ten years down the line. It's a maintenance and inspection cycle that catches this kind of thing while resurfacing is still cheaper than removal — with a public, trackable status, the way capital projects like this should be reported in the first place.

The Bathgate Park survey is open until July 21. If you've played on that court, or want to see basketball stay part of that park's future rather than get designed out of it, this is the window to say so: bit.ly/BathgatePark