Back in 2024, the parks commission we put together a brand new parks master plan. Part of that parks master plan, one of the first items on the agenda there was to um seek and add a parks director position to uh staffing.

I mean I think that a lot of them in my opinion a lot of them go hand in hand, right? Like I I think that if you secure funding through various additional means, if your um position is doing that, then you can do more recreational program. then you can do um more community engagement with that.

I guess my answer would be I support a position that is leaning towards that. Maybe it grows into a parks director and I'm just thinking operationally how we are with our public works department and how we have with our communications. Maybe it's nobody don't shoot the messenger here, but maybe it's like parks coordinator or something like that to start off with and then you when you grow the program and you get something and the city grows and you have more resources to put towards that then it maybe becomes a director position and you you know you're doing more with that.

Are we putting the restructuring new parks? Do they all need the park systems? I would argue that no, they don't. So more of a focus on where they're important uh to be, you know, fiscally responsible for the city on this turnaround.

The financial side of it, right? I mean if we're replacing playgrounds every 20 25 years with with 14 playgrounds soon to be 15. I mean we're looking at every year and a half replacing a playground at that rate, right? and that's $200 to $300,000 every year and a half to two years where um if that's the need then you know great like that that it's a it's a good investment but the second piece of it is is it the best use of of all the parks that we have right

Part of the part of the hard part with this was the council has had a yearslong discussion and you you're well aware about do we start to shift towards larger more centralized less number of playgrounds then in the long term you get more bang for the buck. you have one or two really large ones and less of your 150 to $200,000 ones or do we continue to do your your 130 your 150 200 everywhere and it just happened that this was the time when Lions is up.

What we really are looking at are starting the community engagement, planning, um, financial analysis for the implementation and long-term maintenance. That's one of the things that we think is crucial is understanding what this is going to cost the city and then understanding what options you have that may bring in more revenue, some options that could lower expenses and then what does this look like long term um to the city.

I mean the artificial turf on a soccer field is about a million dollars per field.

You get one shot at making it right. Right.

I think that as I look at our system, I think it's not particularly fair and equitable by a long stretch of the imagination.

So then what are some of the other variables that can be included that can be data driven and efficient for implementation that we can start to use?

I guess my recommendation would be that we look more at the residential use type and and just keep an eye on the surface water management, the equations and just make sure that we're capturing that to be equitable for new developments and and the old developments to make sure everybody's on the same page.

So we are just trying to narrow down and finalize the number that we need for um our preliminary levy at next week's meeting. Um and also just taking any additional input on the budget um from from here on out.

So we decreased the general fund levy by $400,000. Um and this does assume uh using fund balance of around $270,000 at this time.