The green sticky dots meant good idea. The red sticky dots meant no thanks.

At a town hall on the future of Ontario Place Tuesday night, Rob Brooks added his green dot to a tide of others on the big picture of a pavilion like the one in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Attendees were invited to sticker their opinions on a host of options for the now-shuttered theme park: beach space (popular), skating rink (surprisingly sparse), and a retail zone (awash in red), to name a few.

“What I’d like to see there is an open-air, year-round, festival-sized (arts) space,” said Brooks, who works in the music industry. As he later added: “Toronto misses the festival circuit, because we don’t really have the venue for it” — a missed economic opportunity, he thinks.

One option received a gigantic red sticky before the town hall even started: a casino.

Former provincial Progressive Conservative leader John Tory, who hosted the meeting, earned vigorous applause after telling the audience: “We have reached a conclusion on that already, and our conclusion was that Ontario Place is not the appropriate site for a casino.”

He sent a letter to that effect to provincial Tourism Minister Michael Chan.

Tory was appointed to chair an advisory panel on the revitalization of the aged amusement park after Queen’s Park announced in February it was closing down Ontario Place until 2017.

The move saves $20 million a year by slashing 48 full-time jobs and 600 summer positions. The Molson Canadian Amphitheatre and a handful other attractions will remain open.

While Ontario Place drew three million visitors a year in the decade after it was built in 1971, it has struggled to attract 400,000 annual attendees in recent years.

As Tory told the audience, the kid-friendly park was built when the median age in the province was approximately a dozen years younger than it is today — it is now 40. Fierce competition from other amusement and water parks has also drawn visitors away.

Aside from what city councillor Mike Layton termed the night’s exercise in “dotmocracy,” attendees brainstormed in groups about how to draw visitors year-round, how to fund new facilities in the current fiscal climate, and what public realm uses were most attractive to them.

Mike Mannella, a public servant, was a vocal supporter of sports facilities like volleyball courts.

“I’m very active. I love my sports,” he later said. “So when I think of it, I think of jogging, snowboarding, skiing, a balance between summer and winter sports.”

Lara Herald went against popular sentiment and was one of the very few who put a green sticky next to a picture of residential development, a move out-stickied by a factor of seven.

“It can sound scary if you envision massive condos like the ones we see going up around the area now, and that’s one thing. But what if it could be a model of a sustainable community?” said the landscape architect.

Attendees also had a chance to write in ideas they thought were missing.

“Arts high school,” wrote one.

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“Floating hotel,” wrote another.

“Organic urban farm,” wrote a third.

“Keep the water park and the kids’ village around the waterpark OPEN!” one attendee scribbled. “My daughter is heartbroken.”

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