Dear Members of the Community, 

My name is Ben Devito, I am one of the Head Coaches and Athletic Directors of Blue Devils Athletic Club, a local track and field team that has been training and competing in Toronto for over a decade. 

Birchmount Stadium is one of the greatest outdoor sporting facilities the Greater Toronto Area has to offer. Having been renovated for the Pan Am Games, it is now considered a “premier” facility. There is no doubt that this track and field stadium, with all its amenities and equipment, is an asset to the health and fitness as well as athletic development of the Scarborough community. Because of this high-quality sporting facilility, the community can offer valuable opportunities to children, teenagers and adults that many cities across Ontario are not as fortunate to enjoy. However, this premier stadium remains locked and inaccessible.

This creates a significant barrier to many members of our community. Our community is built upon a diverse foundation of backgrounds and abilities. Within our own team we are composed of individuals from low income households, students with various disabilities, and athletes that represent Team Ontario and Team Canada. Unfortunately all of our athletes regularly struggle to access the proper facilities due to poor communication and a lack of availability at Birchmount Stadium. Instead our athletes are now forced to commute for over an hour outside of the city to be able to access a track. Because of the permit rules and regulations around Birchmount Stadium, access is restricted and expensive borderlining classism and ableism. All local clubs including Variety Village, Flying Angels, Glen Manor, and Phoenix (the coach of which the stadium is named after) are forced to commute outside of Scarborough to tracks in Downsview or York University.

To improve the accessibility of Birchmount Stadium, so that the Scarborough community can fully reap the health, fitness, and athletic benefits from this premier facility, we propose the following solutions.

1. Birchmount Stadium implements community hours (potentially on the TDSB permits) to allow all Scarborough community members to use the facility. The stadium was made and is maintained with tax-payer dollars. Therefore, it is logical that the stadium be open to the community when possible. The TDSB should not “monopolize” the stadium from 8:00am – 6:00pm, especially when they do not use it and it remains empty. Community hours should include periods of time on weekends as well, when the Stadium is not permitted.

2. Birchmount Stadium includes greater transparency during the permit booking process. The poor communication between the permit officers, managers and workers is appalling. Permits are constantly canceled, changed, or not communicated between the managers and facility staff. We suggest a smoother system for booking permits that is posted online to the public when the stadium is booked.

3. Clubs and organizations should be allowed to permit the stadium together, to cut down individual costs of the permit as well as share and maximize the use of the large facility. If all sporting teams produce proof of their insurance, they should be allowed to work together and use the stadium together. This includes teams that are part of different organizations and sports, including a soccer team using field space and athletic teams using the track simultaneously. 

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