City Manager Addresses Park Department Request

The city can address issues with park maintenance within its current structure, although City Manager Thomas Ambrosino said it is something his administration needs to better address.

Last week, the city council held a subcommittee meeting to discuss District 6 Councilor Giovanni Recupero’s request that the city look into establishing a parks and recreation department, specifically to address maintenance concerns at the city’s parks.

“We used to have a park department before consisting of a superintendent of parks, a part-time secretary, and three DPW workers, with permits approved by a park commission with three to five members,” said Recupero.

Currently, the city contracts out much of the maintenance work for the parks at $200,000 per year, although the DPW does assist with park maintenance.

Establishing a standalone parks department would create a hands-on approach to make sure the parks and playgrounds are clean.

“I see how the parks are maintained and they are not maintained as well as they could be,” said Recupero. “I get complaints all the time.”

Ambrosino said he does not believe the city needs to do a major reorganization to accomplish the goals set out by Recupero. He also said he believed there were two different issues with a parks department, the maintenance and the programming.

Ambrosino said the programming is handled within the Recreation and Cultural Affairs department, much the same as parks and recreation departments operate in other cities.

“In cities I’m familiar with, including my former city (Ambrosino was mayor of Revere), these were separate and distinct jobs handled by separate entities,” said Ambrosino. “There was for maintenance, a parks division within the DPW, and there was for programming a parks and recreation department. We have a similar setup where we have a DPW and we have a Recreation and Cultural Affairs division that essentially has the capabilities of doing both things.”

At least on the maintenance side of the equation, Ambrosino said the city has more work to do.

“I can see that the maintenance of our parks is not the best and part of the problem is that this DPW has never had a dedicated crew just for parks.”

For the current summer, Ambrosino said the city will continue to use an outside vendor for parks maintenance, with an assist from DPW workers not specifically dedicated to the parks.

During the summer, Ambrosino said the city, and Acting DPW Director Louis Mammolette will be looking at evaluating options to possibly set up a DPW parks division for Fiscal Year 2024. Ambrosino said he was reluctant to add new DPW positions in the FY23 budget since he was already adding 13 new city positions.

By the end of the calendar year, Ambrosino said he expects to have a recommendation for a more robust parks maintenance program.

“If we have a dedicated group of DPW employees focused exclusively on parks, as many cities do, we will be able to accomplish what we want to accomplish in the realm of maintenance,” said Ambrosino.

Several councilors did raise questions about the programming of the recreation department, and especially providing more programs for teenagers.

Ambrosino said the Recreation and Cultural Affairs division provides a healthy amount of programming, and noted that many of the programs that are labeled “community schools” programs in the schools are the same as recreation programs offered to young people in other communities.

“This idea of community schools has always driven me a bit crazy since I arrived here,” said Ambrosino. “It’s really just a branding of programming in the schools, every parks and recreation department does programming in the school buildings. Our Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department; and it just has that name, it’s semantics, it could be called the Parks and Recreation Department; it has programming in the schools like every other parks and recreation department, and it has programming outside in the parks.

“The ‘community schools’ is just the branding for what goes on in the school buildings,” Ambrosino continued. “We are really trying to get away from that branding because it leads people to believe the city does not really have a parks and recreation department. The Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department is a park and recreations department as is understood in other communities.”

Recupero said he would like to see a further discussion of the maintenance of the parks at a future meeting.

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