A Toronto councillor is opposing a $6 million restoration of Central Tech’s contaminated 1960s-era playing field, including the installation of a seasonal dome that would allow students to use the outside space year-round.

The temporary dome would cover the massive field, which fronts the school along Bathurst St. north of Harbord St., each year from November until April.

Vaughan says he fears the proposed dome will block views of the heritage school and wreck the character of the street.

“There’s an aesthetic issue. Central Tech and Bathurst St. were part of a (city) study,” says Vaughan. “And putting up a huge 16-metre bubble, even if it’s there for five or six months of the year, it creates issues.”

Vaughan, councillor for Ward 20, said he also objects to privatizing a public asset.

“That green field — in a neighbourhood like Harbord Village where there are no parks, where you learn to ride a bike and where you kick a ball with your kids — it’s non-programmed recreational space for families in the neighbourhood.”

Officials with the TDSB, who brokered the deal to build the dome with Toronto-based Razor Management— and at no cost to the board — are baffled.

“The dome is temporary. It’s a seasonal dome,” says board spokesperson Sherri Schwartz Maltz. “Central Tech is an inner-city school with a vibrant football program. These kids need football; want football,” she says. “They deserve a place to play.”

The deal includes roughly $6 million in upgrades including the seasonal dome, a FIFA-grade artificial turf, a running track, lighting and improvements to showers and change rooms at the north end of the field.

Central Tech has use of the field and track during the school day. After hours and on weekends, sports leagues pay Razor Management a permit fee to use the facility; residents can also use the running track in the winter for a fee. In the spring, when the dome comes down, community members have free access to the track, as well as the field when it’s not in use.

The school won the city football championships last year and a number of former students have gone on to professional sports, including Saskatchewan Roughrider Tristan Black and Adriano Belli, a former player in the CFL and NFL who is now retired.

Principal Sheryl Freeman says the high school also has a significant rugby program. It was unprecedented when 17-year-old student Charity Williams, who didn’t play the sport until she went to Central Tech, was drafted by Canada’s national rugby team last year.

Freeman says the dome would allow Central Tech to not only expand those programs, but all of the school’s popular physical education programs, which include swimming and weight classes that are already full.

The school’s heavily used playing field is often more than mud than grass, says Maurice Cimmi, part of an alumni committee whose members support the dome. “If we don’t get this project, it won’t get developed,” he says.

The board distributed 8,000 flyers and held a community meeting in April 2012 to gauge community support for the project. About 75 people attended; after positive feedback, the board issued a request for proposals. Razor Management was chosen to build the dome and restore the playing field in 2013, although the project has yet to be finalized.

Razor Management’s early soil testing, a standard procedure in any board construction project, also showed the ground was contaminated. The board closed the field in November after the testing revealed cinder and ash levels above provincial environment ministry standards.

Carla Kisko, assistant director of finance and operations for the TDSB, says the field is not unsafe, but the board will have to address the contamination issue now that the soil has been disturbed.

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“If we walked away the board would have to clean it up regardless,” says Matthew Raizenne, of Razor Management.

The plan has been moving ahead, but in October, Vaughan asked city staff to report on a historical designation for the 1915 school, one of Toronto’s oldest, and to consider the “entire school site as a cultural heritage landscape and the iconic view corridors from Bathurst Street to the original main entrance of the school building.”

The staff report is expected early this year. A city spokesperson said it’s “premature” to say whether a historical designation would kill the project.

“Domes can be temporary structures with no long-term impact,” said spokesperson Bruce Hawkins. “It depends on the report conclusions and the type of enclosure. It is too soon for staff to speculate.”

Raizenne says his company has been open to making improvements, including removing a three-metre-high chainlink fence that surrounds the field and replacing it with a wrought-iron version that would be situated behind the trees that line Bathurst St.

Raizenne says his company has also done a parking and traffic study and that the “entire facility needs can be met with existing on-site TDSB parking.”

Central Tech is not the first TDSB school to get a dome. Razor Management opened a similar facility at Monarch Park Collegiate in the city’s east end, near Coxwell and Danforth Aves., in 2012.

That dome encompasses an artificial field the length of an NFL football field and a 372-metre running track. A 6,000-square-foot clubhouse, with change rooms, showers and offices for not-for-profit sports associations, is about to open.

The company also has plans to build a third dome at Applewood Heights Secondary School in Mississauga.

A public information meeting is being held by the board in Central Tech’s auditorium at 7 p.m. Thursday.