Mayor Ian Boddy responded to a question on CFOS Open Line on Tuesday, July 28.

Listener: “What's the City's stance on Stoney Orchard? My stand is, I don't like seeing parkland being taken away from the City. It's hard enough to get it in the first place, let alone keeping it. What's the City's stance on it and where are we on it?

Mayor: We have a Parks Master Plan that we looked at a few years ago and we had an awful lot of input into it as we put that together. So the master plan sets out a process if we are disposing of public land. And so there is an eight-step process. Right now we're only at step 3 and that was to ask the residents in the neighbourhood, or others, how they use the park. In a sense it is not really a park as park people think of parkland. It does not include the trail. Let me repeat that. It does not include the trail. Most of the letters we've received are saying that you can't remove the trail, and this is awful – it doesn't include the trail.

Whether we get to the point that we sell it or exchange it or do something with it is a long way off. I know that there are some people on the internet that are stirring up the fuss and saying that we are taking away that trail and we're selling a park and people don't think we should sell a park but there's going to be lots of options such as exchange that land for other park.

Within that park master plan there are needs in different parts of the city for parkland; there's needs for playground, there's needs for just plain open space. In some neighbourhoods there's an abundance of those things so all of that is in the report, the master plan and we will look at how do we get where we want to get so, it's a long process."