The Committee and Culture Committee held a hearing on Thursday, July 16, 2026, to review the city's parks and recreation amenities and programming. Presentations were given by Director of Recreation Bob Smith and Superintendent of Recreation Sean Poolin, covering current inventory, recent and future projects, program expansion, funding mechanisms, and planning processes. The discussion also addressed fee-in-lieu policies, park distribution, Wi-Fi, child care, and partnerships.
Sure. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the committee and culture committee hearing meeting for Thursday, July sixteenth, two thousand twenty six. Today we have parks and recreation amenities and programming. This item will be presented by Director of Recreation, Bob Smith. Thank you. Bob Smith, Director for Parks and Recreation. I also have Sean Poolin here, our superintendent of recreation. Excited to be here today. We have a PowerPoint presentation that we put together for you. Well, can you be one favorite? Can you move the microphone in front of you? We are being broadcast. Thank you. We have the PowerPoint presentation that we put together. But we're excited to be here today. Thank you for the opportunity here to talk about our amenities, park amenities, and our recreation programming, what we're currently doing, and how we plan for the future moving forward with those amenities. So with that, do we have a clicker? There we go. Perfect. So just kind of moving everything, moving through everything. You all have seen this before, but uh our current park infrastructure and the amenities that we have. Uh we have uh 79 parks, uh a little over a thousand acres uh within those parks, 42 athletic fields, uh 44 playgrounds, 55 sports courts. Uh the sport courts are range from basketball to pickleball to tennis. Uh we have 26 rental pavilions, um, uh two skate parks uh and three inline rinks, and then we have three dog parks. Uh that doesn't take into account uh the acres and acres of passive space that we have within our park system. Uh the community can enjoy uh grassy areas, wooded areas, nature areas, um, as well as uh uh miles and miles of path network. Um go one more, Sean. So our park improvement projects, uh the map on the right uh was in the budget presentation. The red dots uh indicate parks throughout the city. Uh, where in the past five years we've done renovation work or created new parks. Um part of those are our playground and sport court renovations. That's part of our uh annual CIP program that we fund uh uh yearly. Um just some current projects uh that we're working on or wrapping up Westside Regional Park. We've talked about that recently. If you haven't been out there in a while, uh get out there. Um both multi-purpose fields are done uh and the baseball field is completely finished. Uh now we're in the growing period, actually watering it uh throughout the summer and into the fall, and if all goes well, uh those fields will be playable come spring of 27. So that's very exciting. Uh just wrapped up uh project at Lucas Village Park, uh reservice of the basketball court and the skate park surface uh out there. Uh also basketball court renovations recently wrapped up at Lake Coventry and Clear Story Parks, um, and a playground uh full renovation at Valley Street Park at Riverside Park recently completed the boat ramp project, uh which completely renovated the boat ramp uh that goes there into the Monocasee. Um and then the ongoing work at McCurdy Field. Uh if you happen to see a crane out at McCurdy Field next week, uh tomorrow's the last day of baseball season, uh, and then the field will be closed and we're putting up new lights, state of the art uh LED muscle lighting. Uh so that's going up part of the ongoing renovations there, obviously the field um uh new surface, irrigation. We've done concrete work. Uh so after the lights we'll be moving forward with some more concrete work and more bleacher work. So the legion is over. Yeah, baseball will be finished. Uh there's a game tonight, and depending how tonight goes, a game tomorrow, and then uh baseball usage will be done. So we'll get the lights up and then we'll convert it over for football for the fall.