Vancouver Olympic organizers launch community outreach around venues
Vancouver residents are getting their first peek at what life in the city will look like during the 2010 Winter Games, but the quick glimpse might not answer many major concerns.
Organizers have announced they’ll hold a series of 10 meetings beginning next week and over the summer in communities around Olympic venues.
“It’s the first step in sharing with the residents who live in communities where there is a Games venue what that experience will be like in terms of their work, their play, their day-to-day life and also give them a sense of what’s going to happen when,” said Renee Smith-Valade, vice-president of the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee, known as VANOC.
The sessions, which follow private conversations organizers have had with city officials and community boards, will address such topics as what time venues will open and close, what sorts of infrastructure will be built around them to support Games activities and what events will be taking place inside.
Vancouver organizers will return twice more to the 10 affected communities, once next spring and again next fall.
With the meetings beginning next week, VANOC will run ads and keep the information on their website current so people can plan to attend, Smith-Valade said.
Keith Jacobson, president of the Killarney Community Centre Society, said this month’s meeting is the first time his community-at-large has heard from VANOC and he was unaware until Tuesday afternoon that the meeting had been set for next month.
The east-end neighbourhood is home to a training venue for short-track speed skating, and the rink abuts a community centre that’s home to dozens of programs from day care to fitness classes.
What concerns him most, Jacobson said, is how security measures for the Games are going to restrict community activities.
“It’s a community centre and the Olympics are supposed to be a community event and if you close down the swimming pool, what’s the community going to think?” he said, adding that for services like day care, provision is needed year-round.
“You have to be respectful of the community during the Olympics. I understand security, I understand the threat of terrorism but you also have to keep in mind the community.”
Smith-Valade said specific information on security is still some months away.
“We’re not ready at a detailed level yet,” she said.
“Our goal is by fall of 2009, they will have a very clear sense of all of the information they will need to plan their daily lives during the Games but the information will come out in degrees and in stages.”
Clay Yandle, who lives near the curling venue in Vancouver, said he’s opposed to the Games but it’s the right thing for organizers to be reaching out to the community.
He said given that there’s still over a year left to go until the Olympics, he understands why organizers are only coming to his backyard now, but he feels the lines of communication should have been opened sooner.
He said the full implication of having the Games in people’s own backyard extends beyond the days of athletic competition.
“It’s going to be almost two months when it is said and done because there has to be some sort of giant security sweep that’s done well in advance of opening day and all that,” said Yandle, who also sits on the board of the Riley Park Community Centre.
“That’s something that I don’t think people realize.”
During the Games itself, he said, he and many of his neighbours plan to leave town.
Yandle said residents of Riley Park are more excited about the fact that after the Games, the curling venue will be turned into a community centre, though funding for that hasn’t yet been approved.
Tammie Tupechka heads a community group fighting against the Olympics’ use of an east-end ice rink called Britannia as another training venue, in part because of security concerns and because of the potential for service disruptions.
She said community consultation should move beyond the venue communities and into the community at large.
She pointed out that over this past winter, both Riley Park and Killarney rinks were closed for pre-Olympic touch-ups, leaving Britannia the only rink serving a wide population.
If it becomes a Games venue too, she said, where are communities supposed to work and play together during the Games?
Tupechka said Vancouver organizers have continually made promises that the community will be involved in the execution of the Games.
“VANOC wants to get whatever it needs done and I don’t think it really cares,” she said.
“They want to put the Olympics on, they want it to be a certain way and that’s the way it is. There is no connection with the community, with any community.”
From http://victoriastar.canadaeast.com/article/322047
