Investing in our neighbourhoods

River Heights – Fort Garry

Parks and community centres play an important role in bringing neighbourhoods together. They are places we can gather, they’re convenient places for your children to play, they are spots for keeping active and they offer greenspace within a sea of concrete.

I know the pride you take in these community hubs throughout River Heights-Fort Garry. Maintaining and improving these spaces requires sustained and consistent financial commitments from City Hall.

As your city councillor, I am proud to ensure that we continue investing in our beloved parks and centres. Looking at this year, I’m especially excited to share what we have accomplished so far.

In Marshall Crescent Park, you may already be enjoying over $180,000 worth of investment in a new play structure for children aged two to five, a new sandbox and seating areas with a bench and picnic table. We’ve also added an asphalt pathway and bike racks. All these improvements were installed on top of improved drainage features, in addition to new sod and soil.

In Kleysen Park, working with nearly $245,000, we expanded the playground for older kids between five and t12 while also creating more places to visit with family and neighbours with new picnic tables, benches, seating areas and a shade shelter. New paths lead to the shade shelter and the expanded play area, providing additional seating and gathering opportunities. Newly planted trees provide additional visual interest and shade. New Bike racks are planned for the space, so the location will be more cyclist- and active-living friendly.

While we’ve had to say goodbye to wading pools at the Harrow and Cordova Parks, we’re working hard to redevelop these sites to ensure they remain important and safe places for our community. At Harrow Park, this has meant adding a large shade shelter, pathways, benches, picnic tables and new sod and soil. In Cordova Park, a construction project is beginning on a new natural play area, which will include a fun log mountain, climbing logs, stepping posts and limestone blocks.

As we gear up for hockey season, we’re also investing in our rinks. At Sir William Osler Park, we’ve installed new boards and associated rink fencing along the top of the boards for $111,000 at the outdoor rink to make sure players of all ages will be able to play safely this winter. The Sir John Franklin site of the Central Corydon Community Centre will soon welcome $20,000-worth of re-engineered lighting so that the spotlight will continue to be on our all-star skaters all season long.

I hope many of you are already seeing the benefits of these improvements throughout the ward and I look forward to sharing more investments that we’ll be making later this year.

In the meantime, if you have ideas on how we can continue to make our parks and community centres safer and better for years to come, please reach out to my office at 204-986-5236 or jorlikow@winnipeg.ca