by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Mayor-elect John Peyton’s Parks and Recreation subcommittee will meet next week to begin a review of Mayor John Delaney’s prized parks system. Subcommittee chair Cleve Warren said nothing would be off-limits as his committee considers structural and personnel changes to the department.
“The steering committee told me to take an objective view of the entire system,” said Warren. “There will be no sacred cows.”
Warren, a vice president at CapTrust Financial Advisors, challenged the mayor-elect’s “White Paper” committee — charged with developing big concepts for the incoming mayor’s consideration — not to add layers of bureaucracy to a growing department. During a Tuesday meeting, the committee recommended establishing a seven-member commission to oversee funding and safety throughout City parks.
“With the addition of conservation, the Parks and Recreation Department is becoming a large animal. Let’s be careful not to move backwards,” said Warren. “The commission could make more political problems.”
Several committee members said a new parks commission, modeled after the Jacksonville Children’s Commission, would simplify the City’s dispersal of funds to its parks. Mark Middlebrook, executive director of the Preservation Project, said under the current structure, some parks are given more money than necessary while others suffer neglect, resulting in an entire park system in “various stages of incompletion.”
White Paper Committee chair Bobby Stein said the Peyton administration’s stated goal — to create the country’s best park system in time for the 2005 Super Bowl — would not be possible under the current structure.
Warren said his subcommittee would learn from other successful nationwide park systems. He was unsure whether the committee would recommend to close failing City parks, however, he immediately challenged current Parks and Recreation Department head Debra Igou’s assertion that closing such parks would be “political suicide.”
Told that only chickens and vagrants inhabit Orange Street’s Confederate Park, Warren asked, “Whose constituents are those? Do they vote?”
Warren said his committee would be “as expeditious as possible” in forming its structural and personnel recommendations to the steering committee. Given the late start because of the mayoral runoff, he said it was unlikely that the recommendations would come before Peyton’s July 1 inauguration, but said they would come soon after.