While Sarnia's Rainbow Park is no longer the site of a homeless encampment, reported expenses related to temporary health and safety measures have cost the city roughly $937,000 in total, to date.
In a non-agenda report, city staff said $27,915 was spent on security services and $5,149 on site clean up in May.
Communications Manager Steve Henschel said at this time, a decision has not been made as to how long security personnel will remain on site.
"The park is very much open to our residents. We encourage anyone who wishes to come out and use it," he said. "You will still see that security is still on site. We're doing that just in the interim to ensure that an encampment doesn't return to the site and we're going from there."
Last spring, a few dozen tents were set up at the Christina Street park -- numbers fluctuated throughout the year.
In June 2024, city council agreed to implement temporary measures at the park. At times, monthly expenses topped $100,000.
After months of discussion surrounding the controversial encampment, city council voted to clear the site and begin scaling down measures.
The homeless encampment was cleared from the park in late February. Since then, clean up efforts have been ongoing.
"Really, we've been aiming to restore that park to the recreational space it was designed to be," Henschel said. "A lot of that has been site clean up, obviously going over every square inch to pick up any refuse, trash, biological material that were left behind. More recently, we pulled all of the sand out of the playground and replaced it with engineered wood fiber, which is something we're doing at all of our parks. We do a couple every year, we replace the sand with engineered wood fibre, it has a number of benefits from safety to cleanliness."
Grass repairs were also carried out at the park this spring. Henschel said next, the city is planning to replace the fence at the back of the park this year.
"Some of it was damaged over the course of the encampment but it was also just nearing the end of its life so it's actually part of our regular asset replacement," he said. "However, it might have moved ahead a little forward but it was nearing the end of its life."
Until the fence is repaired, a temporary fence has been set up to block it from park users. The fence replacement wasn't included in the May expense report.