The Vancouver board of parks and recreation wants low-income families and individuals to swim and skate for free at all community centres.

The board also likes to see poor people get a 50 percent discount on other recreation programs offered at the centres, and admissions to local attractions like the Bloedel Conservatory and VanDusen Botanical Garden.

This is why the park board wants all 22 community centres to accept the city’s Leisure Access Program (LAP) as part of a new joint operating agreement (JOA) over recreation facilities.

According to board chair Sarah Kirby-Yung, the LAP is currently available only at 12 community centres.

“We thought that it was important that every neighbourhood should have that, so that’s one of the things we’re asking in the agreement for the centres to accept,” Kirby-Yung told the Straight in an interview.

A draft of a new joint operating agreement on the community centres will be presented at a park board meeting Monday (December 12).

Park commissioners will vote on a new deal on January 25.

“With the new agreement, those subsidies would be available at all community centres across the city,” said Kirby-Yung about the LAP.

The negotiation of a new operating agreement has been a thorny issue with the park board, starting with the past administration.

The facilities are owned by the city, and programs are administered by community centre associations based on the needs of their respective neighbourhoods.

Under the then Vision Vancouver majority, the park board was criticized by a number of community centre associations for supposedly wanting to take control over these recreation centres.

The dispute sparked a legal dispute between the city and insurgent associations, straining the relationship between the parties.

In 2014, a court issued an injunction preventing the city from kicking the associations in Hastings, Kensington, Kerrisdale, Killarney, Riley Park Hillcrest, and Sunset out of their respective centres.

In November of that year, the Non-Partisan Association took control over the board, with NPA commissioners Kirby-Yung, John Coupar, Erin Shum, and Casey Crawford forming the majority of the seven-person board.

Coupar told the Straight in February 2015 that the board has also provided park staff guidance to “move forward”.

“There’s a new tone and a new direction, and we’re looking forward to bringing everybody to the table and getting an agreement,” said Coupar, who was board chair at the time.

Getting everybody to agree on a new agreement doesn’t look easy.

On December 5, a statement was issued on behalf of 15 community centre associations, which expressed disappointment over the draft of the proposed deal.

“The current draft of the JOA misses the mark,” Ainslie Kwan, former president of the Killarney community centre association, said in the statement.

The statement identified the following areas of concern: dispute resolution, membership, financial costs, multiple provisions for termination of the relationship, and association governance and autonomy.

The statement also quoted Alex Burton, board member of the Mount Pleasant community centre association, saying, “Let’s be clear here. We have a strong group of 15 Community Centre Associations that have come together in collaboration and consensus on what must be included in the JOA – this is unprecedented.”

In the interview, park board chair Kirby-Yung presented a different picture.

“Actually, we’ve had some really encouraging feedback,” Kirby-Yung told the Straight. “We’ve had an eight-month consultation process with the community centres. We got 257 pages of feedback. We’ve incorporated a lot of the feedback from the community centre associations into the draft operating agreement.”

Kirby-Yung was interviewed at the sidelines of a park board event that was attended also by her NPA colleagues, including Coupar.

When asked about the issue, Coupar expressed optimism that the board will be able to seal a deal because the agreement is beneficial to everyone.

Coupar told the Straight: “We encourage everyone to read the agreement.”