Caroline Harvey-Smith saw an unusual sight on Aug. 14 - a playground she describes as immaculate being torn down to the ground.
“I don't know why they would feel the need to do it,” says Harvey-Smith about the City of Guelph removing the playground.
She says she has two major concerns with the park being replaced. One, why replace things that are perfectly good? And second, couldn't these pieces have been offered to someone else?
“Obviously, they've made some budgetary decisions on this but why don't they do something with these pieces? They were in perfectly good shape. They just completely crashed them.”
Harvey-Smith says she couldn’t find anything wrong with the playground except the swings which had some rust on it.
“I've just been thinking, in a time of budgetary constraints, why are we putting in a new playground when the playground is in perfect shape?” says Harvey-Smith.
“The slides were looking absolutely immaculate, they are plastic slides and they are not damaged at all. The body frame is metal and its all been beautifully painted not that long ago, you can see it. It's in incredibly good shape.”
Manager of Parks Operations and Forestry, Parks and Recreation, Martin Neumann says the equipment in St. George Park’s playground was getting older and needed to be replaced as do other city playgrounds because it becomes an issue of safety.
The city replaces playgrounds once they reach the end of their life cycle which is typically 15 to 20 years.
Neumann says a playground’s presumed lifecycle is, on average, 18 years and as a playground life gets close to 18 years, his department looks through the maintenance and safety inspection records to evaluate whether the park is better or worse than average.
In this case, it was time for the playground to be replaced because it had surpassed 18 years.
“Basically we consider that to be the date where it becomes more expensive to keep it safe than to replace it,” says Neumann.
The five playgrounds that will undergo this massive change this summer are in Burns Drive Park, Grange Road Park, Royal City Park, St. George’s Park and Suffolk Street Park.
