Bartholomew County Council members are considering a working draft of the county park system’s five-year master plan with an eye on staffing needs and minimizing costs.
Planner and former city parks administrator Ed Curtin unveiled the draft to the council in a work session Monday, calling it the “start of a conversation.”
The plan identifies suggestions for park improvements and recommendations to add a full-time administrator to oversee operations. It also recommends that some existing county parks be re-evaluated.
A final draft of the plan is due to the Indiana Division of Outdoor Recreation by April 15 to be considered for any grants. The Bartholomew County Council will consider the plan at its meeting on Tuesday in the fourth floor council chambers inside the county’s governmental office building at Third and Franklin streets.
Curtin said the total cost for the five-year master plan improvements is about $1.3 million. This includes costs for everything Curtin identified as he evaluated the facilities and talked with staff members.
The department asked Curtin to find out how Bartholomew County compares to other parks and recreation systems in the state. In his research, Curtin said he found that, while parks and recreation departments across the state vary in the number of parks they have and the acreage devoted to park land, all departments have employed full-time staff members.
“Working with the folks they have helping them right now, we identified all the parks they’ve got, the number of people they use to take care of those facilities and all the different activities they have in the process of getting that work complete,” Curtin said. “At the end of the day, we were showing that they were deficient in labor about 72 hours over the course of the week.”
Curtin said the parks department is operating at a labor deficiency, meaning local county parks don’t receive the care the facilities need. One of the issues is that parks employs part-time staff, but only during the mowing months of the year — March through October.
“The problem is we’ve got parks there 12 months out of the year and people use them 12 months out of the year,” Curtin said. “We’re not always able to get on top of it as quickly because we don’t have a full-time staff on board.”
Park board members handle most of the administrative decisions, while four part-time and mostly seasonal employees handle the labor.
Curtin said the board has already started looking at the process of obtaining a full-time employee who would handle both hands-on work and administrative duties.
Also included in the park’s master plan is a recommendation for lighting the fields at Wayne Park. Curtin said adding lights to the field would create an opportunity for the park to host more large tournaments, similar to Dunn Stadium in Columbus, which generates the system’s greatest revenue.
Last year, the Dunn and Heflen Park facilities generated more than $39,000 in revenue. Dunn Stadium, located next to the Bartholomew County 4-H Fairgrounds, hosted 38 tournaments last summer, while the stadium’s BMX track attracted more than 1,000 riders.
During a meeting between 15 individuals — mostly elected and appointed county officials — in December, there was discussion about closing some of the county’s parks.
Curtin said in an earlier interview that of the 12 county parks, the closure of two — Clifford and Elizabethtown — should be considered as options. The two communities already have parks within their corporate boundaries, he said.
“It’s not saying you’ve got to close it, sell it or whatever, but that’s in the action plan of being an option,” Curtin said. “The intent was not to say this is what you’ve got to do to close that park. We’re duplicating services and that doesn’t make sense for the benefit of our budget.”
He said it’s started a conversation with both towns about what the county can do to avoid this duplication.
“In my mind, if we need to replace the playground equipment but they’ve already got playground equipment, maybe we take that out and we do something else with the park,” Curtin said. “Maybe we create a pollinator area and instead of a baseball field, we create a cricket field.”
The $1.3 million cost is a combination of maintenance-related improvements, equipment funds and the potential for lighting at Wayne Park. It does not include additional revenue from Wayne or personnel costs, such as funding a full-time director position or part-time assistant to the director.
Curtin recommends adding an assistant position to help in the off-peak season as a safety back-up. He said some work requires the hands of two people, too.
Columbus currently funds 56 full-time employees and 200 part-time employees for its 21 city parks. In comparison, Hamilton County funds 18 full-time employees for its 12 county parks and Harrison County has nine parks with eight full-time employees.
Curtin said what the report doesn’t show is how many of these other counties’ parks are considered nature preserves versus actual active parks. He said maintenance required in a natural setting is different from that required for a sports field.
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The Bartholomew County Parks system’s five-year master plan suggests the addition of at least one full-time director to oversee park operations and complete hands-on work. It also recommends that the county and local towns have conversation about possibly closing some parks to avoid duplicate services. The plan costs $1.3 million in capital improvements.
A final plan is due to the Indiana Division of Outdoor Recreation by April 15.
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To learn more about Bartholomew County’s 12 parks, visit bartholomew.in.gov/parks-and-recreation.html.
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What: Bartholomew County Council
When: 6 p.m. Tuesday
Where: County Governmental Office Building, 440 Third St., Columbus
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