Letter From John Swanson on City Park Management

Bold is mine.

"The City Park Committee was founded in the late spring of 2004. Our mission is to advise the City on the park's needs and to consider proposed donations to the City for placement in the park. We have no executive or legislative authority, and no budget. We're a nine member(plus a City Council representative) committee that meets once each month, except in December. All of our meetings, held the third Tuesday evening of every month at 6:30 PM at the Zoo's ESBA education building, are open and announced to the public."

Those are the basic details, but what do we really do? Our first issue, believe it or not, was the high Canada Goose population in the Park. We were asked to carefully examine the situation, explore options for safely limiting the population of resident geese, and pass a recommendation on to the City. After consulting with quite a few groups, including experts from Zoo staff, Maryland Department of Agriculture or Fish and Wildlife, and I believe the USDA, we recommended a partial cull of the non-migratory flock, with the meat to be donated to homeless shelters. We recommended that this be combined with egg addling to prevent further increases in the flock. In the end, the council decided on addling only. As it turns out, we're currently being asked to re-examine the issue. That should give a picture of what we do in a nutshell.

Aside from larger issues like the geese and the biologs, which require lengthy study and often feature lively debate, we also consider a broad range of donations. While this might seem straightforward, there's a lot to consider in a donation. For instance, does the donated item fit the historical nature of the Park? Does it clash with any landmarks? Is it going to limit open space? Does it fill a need? Do we have a good place for it? Will it have any environmental impacts? Will we need Maryland Historical Trust approval? We consider the donation carefully and then pass a recommendation on to the City as to whether or not it should be accepted.

We also initiate projects on our own, primarily volunteer driven. For instance, we coordinated the repair of the Picnic Island grills with a Masonry teacher from Parkside High School and some of his students. We've also hosted our bi-annual cleanups I referred to in the first e-mail. We've held a Movies @ the Park night, and we're exploring the possibility of a Kickball Tournament

Further, we do keep an eye to the maintenance of the Park, though much of that is outside our direct influence. In fact, in our earliest meetings we identified a need for new benches and trash/recycling receptacles. Most of the sparse seating and all of the trash receptacles in the park are obsolete or otherwise in need of replacement. Regardless of that fact, we'd like to see more of these items in the first place. Unfortunately, it was made very clear to us when this need was identified that funding would not be available for benches and receptacles. We were encouraged to seek donations and other outside sources of these items. Not only is it somewhat difficult to solicit such donations, but the process of handling the donations once secure is extremely cumbersome. All hope is not lost however, we're currently working with a group of aspiring architects to see if they'd be interested in developing plans for trash/recycling receptacles and then building them. The only hangup would be materials, which we're still hoping someone would be willing to donate.

Finally, we're looking into the development of a Masterplan for the Park. It's very difficult to do things piecemeal in such a large Park. Doing so runs the risk of inconsistency and of compromising historical value and open space. Further, we need better parking facilities, and we need to maintain accessibility. To that end, we're working on developing a Masterplan to lay out a framework by which the Committee and the City operate with regard to projects and donations in the Park. This is a long and involved process that will involve a lot of brainstorming among the committee, and will eventually involve the public, as we'll be hosting public input meetings. Unfortunately, funding is again an issue. A professionally constructed planning document is a fairly expensive item. We're currently looking at grant options to help fund the effort, but it's possible we may pursue a limited, Committee-created document until funding is available for a full planning process.

I hope the above provides some insight into what we do. It's certainly not a full inventory of the issues we've considered, but only a snapshot. If you have any questions about the Park or the Committee and its events, please feel free to contact me at any time.

Thanks,John Swanson