Special Parks & Recreation Meeting
January 31 2009
Present: Tim Pascale, Steve Slozak, Steve O’Shea, Barry Cady
Steve opened the meeting at 10:39
Seconded, Steve O’Shea, AIF
We all explained to Tim about our meeting with the Finance Committee and that we educated them about what the P&R department does to all the athletic fields, Parks through out the town, and now the school grounds. The Finance Comm. didn’t realize that we mow most of these fields twice a week, and we explained to them that by mowing twice a week we are putting the grass clippings back into the ground adding nutrients. If we stop this process, now we would have to vacuum the clipping and dispose of them. This adds more labor and a compost problem, as we already have a large compost pile up at the far end of upper Rogers. We told them that our Department also sets up fields for various events, Soccer, Baseball, Softball,Lacrosse,plus the maintaining of the Water Department areas, Conant Brook area, Town Office
Building, Gazebo, Memorial Hall, Arts building, and #1 pond Park. They were shocked by everything that we maintained with the small work force in the Department, but that they feel the Town could run the Parks and Cemetery Departments together with possibly two to three employees. We tried to tell them that this would be an impossible feat to do with all the acreage and less man power.
The Commission and Tim felt that we might be able to streamline the Department a little further to help out the town. The Department maintains apprx. 30 acres of mowing, and the athletic fields need to be maintained to a certain height for playability. Seasonal help is needed to keep current status and maintenance of playing fields. The loss of this workforce will reduce the playability of these areas, and more labor would be needed to get the fields back up to playability. This is not a good use of a labor force as other areas will suffer due to lack of a regular maintenance. Regular maintenance is a good way to keep cost to a minimum, and longer grass means a complete re-set up of fields, costing more monies not only in labor but also product.
We then discussed possibly helping the Cemetery Department out in these difficult times such as, helping them with some mowing with our seasonal help, giving Paul a hand during the Winter month’s with burials and any paper work involved. We also discussed raising fees on all the sports programs to offset the loss of $7200.00 that the Town gives our Department for the kid’s sports programs that we would turn back to the Town in these difficult times. Some savings to our Department in this year’s budget is the reduction of the fees to use the Schools for summer programs. This year the School is charging us $ 500.00 for Summer programs, so this opens some monies up to apply to some of the kids sports programs when we turn back the $ 7200.00 back to the Town. Another problem is with the new Lacrosse
program and all the layouts required setting up for both Girls and Boys as they both require different line layouts for playing. Tim was going to talk to the Lacrosse members to set up with them to purchase paint, line the field, and we would just mow it for meets.
Also discussed was cut out gym monitors and possibly use volunteers ( this is a request from the School Department to use P&R employees ).Discussed options on mowing such as, mowing on weekends if the weather goes south during the week( sometimes it rains during the week, but weekends are dry. Take a day off during the week when it’s raining and pick up mowing on the weekends if it’s dry). Ask Jeannie if she would be willing to take on some of the Cemetery responsibilities, such as meeting with the families when Paul isn’t available, and possibly get more volunteers to help in the P&R Department.
We don’t have a lot of meat to cut out of our Labor part of our budget.
We decided to contact the Cemetery Department and sit down with them to try and come up with a way to help each other out during these difficult times.
Barry motioned to close the meeting, Steve O’Shea seconded AIF
Adjoined at 12:00
Respectfully Submitted
Steve Slozak Chairman
Timothy J Pascale
Director/Program Coordinator
Monson Parks and Recreation
110 Main Street
Monson, MA 01057
1-413-267-4105 ( phone )
1-413-267-0327 ( fax )
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