College Park has seen better days.

Litter pervades the muddy leftover water in the Barbara Anne Scott rink, named after Canada’s only Olympic Gold medalist in women’s singles.

The stucco on the once elegant skating pavilion is peeling away and small plants have sprung up in the building’s eaves troughs.

Throughout, the grass is trampled or the ground bare.

But while the city struggles with a $299 million backlog of repairs to Toronto parks, College Park is the lucky one getting a face lift.

The city is using $3 million in development fees from the builder of the Aura, Canada’s tallest condominium on the northwest corner at Yonge and Gerrard Sts., to redesign the space.

But even that amount may not be enough.

“It’s in need of almost everything,” says Netami Stuart, a landscape architect with the city’s parks and recreation department. “It’s pretty appalling.”

Reconstruction is further complicated by the fact that the park, built in the 1980s, was constructed on top of an underground garage.

“The amount of money we have is going to be tight especially because we’re building on top of a parking lot,” says Stuart. “There are building and structural issues and we can’t just dig willy nilly.

“It’s easier to plant a tree in the ground than it is to plant one in a roof.”

Plans call for retaining the skating rink, but the community will have an important say in the design, size and location, says Stuart.

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and city staff will present preliminary design concepts at a public meeting Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Delta Chelsea on Gerrard St. W.

If it’s kept, the rink, which drew about 1,200 people in the 2011-12 season, would most likely be completely rebuilt in a different location in the park. Scott passed away in September at the age of 84.

The pavilion will be renovated or redesigned, depending on the results of an upcoming report on the building’s structural soundness.

We’re “also doing our best to keep a water feature, but it may not be a giant pond,” says Stuart.

And instead of large swaths of lawn, city staff are looking to make the park more robust and easier to maintain by adding trees and shrubs as well as ground cover that is raised up and separate from pedestrian pathways.

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Stuart says the park has fallen further and further into disrepair over the years even as new condos sprang up around it.

“It’s been well used as a staging area, and part of it as a construction area for Aura,” explains Stuart. But she says it was also overlooked because it’s “hard for surveillance by both police and city park staff. That’s not an excuse but it’s part of the reason it’s in poor condition.”

A final design will be approved in May. Construction of the park will be finished in 2015.