The Monterey Parks and Recreation Commission met on May 14, 2025, to receive a report on department operations from February through April 2025, review and endorse proposed Neighborhood and Community Improvement Program (NCIP) projects for fiscal year 2025-26, approve prior meeting minutes, and hear public comments. The meeting also featured farewell remarks for retiring Parks and Recreation Director Karen, who served 39 years.
Chair Crampton. Vice Chair Ono. Here. Commissioner Benz, absent. Commissioner Boya, absent. Commissioner McEwen here. Commissioner Reed, absent. Commissioner Schmidt. I am here. Thank you. Myself back on. Nate, if you could read the public comment procedures, please. Yes. Good evening, Commissioners. Information on participating in this meeting and providing public comment, including remotely by Zoom or telephone, is available on this meeting's agenda, which is online at iSearch Monterey.gov. Remote commenters will be muted until it is your turn to speak. A timer will be shown on the screen. If you are connected on Zoom, the timer is accurate with no delay. In the chamber, we ask attendees to please keep their phones and devices and devices muted to prevent audio interference with tonight's meeting. Thank you for participating in your city government. Thank you so much, Nate. Presentation on the status of the parks and recreation department operations for February through April of 2025. This is not a project under CEQA Article 20, Section 15378, and under general rule Article 5, Section 15061. Karen. Thank you. Good evening, Commissioners. Tonight we have a presentation of the Parks and Recreation Department operations for you from February through April 2025. And we will start with Heis. The Kiwanis and Green Cadre did some beach cleanups with the um with the public and different nonprofit organizations. And as you can see, we did a lot of a lot of hours doing uh transient camp removal. Um we were just doing that not just the other day as well. Um trying to trying to catch up on that. So um yeah, so you can see in Solda the Retro, we did a drink a drinking fountain. We'll be doing another one of those. That's gonna be at San Carlos Park, hopefully pretty soon. Um did a little bit of extra um turf maintenance at Jack's Fields, uh air verifying and trop dressing it there. Um sister city, as we all know, got uh kind of cut tore up a little bit by our by our sea lion friends, but uh we were able to go back in and our crew did an amazing job um restoring that and re-relandscaping that. So um really um really neat neat thing there. And also, I don't feel we there's if you do take a walk there, we put a memorial plaque. We got reached out to by somebody whose mom planted a cypress tree right there, and she has a picture of her with the cypress tree. Um, so you know, 30, 40 some odd years later, um, where he was able to track down the tree. We put a plaque there, so that's pretty neat. Found the the owner, the rightful owner responsible for that one. Um little projects around square in the process of relancing San Carlos Beach. See you'll you could see some project um some progress there recently. Um and then obviously we've lower presidio, we did our seasonal weed eating through a lot of our different parts like Don Dabby. We did today. Um, but the Lower Presidio we we pushed on and got that done ahead of um the big birthday event, which was last last week. So hopefully some of you were able to make the horticulture fair. I know uh Justin, I saw you there.