County Parks Dept: Let Flagrant Spending Begin

Even though Guilford County just took over the operation of its parks system on Tuesday, Jan. 1, the commissioners are already starting to see unanticipated costs and, increasingly, they're experiencing a parks takeover equivalent of buyer's remorse.

One cost they didn't expect – and apparently didn't know about until The Rhinoceros Times began asking them questions about it – is that in recent weeks County Manager Brenda Jones Fox created a new high-paying position for a parks manager.

The new manager will have the title of "assistant parks administrator" and the county's Human Resources Department began attempting to fill the new position recently.

Guilford County has never run its own parks and, until the Jan. 1 addition of about 30 park employees, it only had one employee devoted to overseeing the parks. The county has always outsourced the operation of its parks to the cities of Greensboro and Burlington, the towns of Gibsonville and Jamestown, and to Forsyth County.

Guilford County staff had told the commissioners that the county would save about $340,000 a year by bringing most of those duties in-house – however, it's becoming clear right from the beginning that Guilford County is going to end up shelling out a lot more than anticipated.

For starters, there's the new park manager position that appeared quietly last month.

The classified ad, which for some strange reason isn't posted on the county's website, was obtained by The Rhino Times through a public records request. It states the salary for the newly created position will fall between $64,042 and $86,456 a year.

The new parks manager will answer to the Property Management Department – which the county has now started calling the Guilford County Property Management and Parks Department.

The ad calls for a college graduate with a bachelor's degree in parks and recreation administration, public administration or a related field, with five years of "progressively responsible experience in Parks & Recreation Administration."

It also calls for one year of supervisory experience or "an equivalent combination of training and experience," and it states that a designation as a certified park and recreational professional is required as well.

The ad states that the assistant director will aid the Property & Parks Management director in "planning, implementing, directing and managing all Parks and Recreation Division functions and resources to achieve the strategic objectives of the department and County."

Sandy Woodard is currently the interim director of that department. Woodard has been interim director for almost two years, ever since former Property Management Director David Grantham retired.

One source said information about the opening has been circulated among the 30 parks workers the county has hired. Those workers will have their same duties they did when they worked for the cities and towns that ran the parks up until midnight Dec. 31, though that may change as the county evaluates how its new parks operations are working.

The $64,000 to $86,000 salary is just the beginning of what the parks takeover will cost. The new parks manager will no doubt need transportation to move around to the various parks, office space and supplies, perhaps an assistant, and, as with all county employees, the new head of county parks, along with the 30 new park workers, will get the attractive county benefits package.

Guilford County Assistant Manager Sharisse Fuller, who's also the county's human resources director, in response to a question about county employee benefits, wrote in an email: "A typical employee with a base salary of $50,000 who enrolls in State retirement, 401(k) and the Retiree Health Savings Plan, and who chooses single coverage for health, dental and life insurance, would get a total annual County benefit contribution of approximately $13,678 as of today."

Commissioner Hank Henning said at the last commissioners meeting that he wants to see the board take another look at the parks takeover decision during the county's upcoming retreat on Thursday, Jan. 10.

Henning said there's a lot to consider and he said he has never felt all of the real costs to Guilford County have been taken into account. Henning said that, for instance, there's the current hot topic issue of equity pay.

During discussions about some controversial raises to county department heads, Fuller told the Board of Commissioners that all new county employees have to be evaluated for equity pay so that Guilford County doesn't leave itself open to a lawsuit.

Henning said that, with the county adding 30 new employees to the payroll, and all of them being evaluated for equity pay, it may be that the county ends up paying those employees more than they were being paid by the cities and towns they worked for, so, he said, that's another cost that has to be factored in.

The 30 new employees will also create additional costs in time and money for the Human Resources Department, which now will have to handle the paper work, evaluations, training, etc., for all of the additional employees.

All these costs will cut into the supposed $340,000 savings that the county is no longer paying out to the cities and towns as a management fee.

"What are the other unanticipated costs of taking over the parks?" Henning asked.

He added that, so far, what he's seen hasn't been reassuring.

"I need a lot of convincing," Henning said. "I want to see the numbers that validate that we really save money."

Henning also said he campaigned on the promise to citizens to help prioritize the county's spending, and he said that, given the pressing needs of the schools, emergency services, law enforcement and other critical county services, he wants to make sure that bringing the parks operations in-house doesn't create a "burden on the budget."

Both Chairman of the Board of Commissioners Linda Shaw and Vice Chairman Bill Bencini have expressed major concerns about the county taking over the operation of the parks. Bencini predicted last month that Guilford County would find itself in a financial and logistical mess shortly after the takeover and he said it wouldn't surprise him if the board tried to undo the move in 2013.

Shaw said this week that, the more she learns, the more she starts to regret the decision.

"Something has bothered me about this," Shaw said. "I'm not sure we didn't jump the gun to quickly on this. Are we really going to save that much?"

Several commissioners old and new have also pointed out that, aside from the monetary considerations, the agreements with Greensboro, Burlington, Gibsonville and Jamestown have, over the years, helped the working relationships between the county and those towns and cities.

Commissioner Alan Branson, who, like Henning was just sworn in as a commissioner at the beginning of December, said the cities and towns that have been operating the county's parks aren't the only ones that the takeover has rubbed the wrong way. Branson said the county's Parks and Recreation Commission was never consulted or even so much as notified of the county's plans to take over the parks.

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"I sat on the parks and recreation board and, to me, it hit out of nowhere," Branson said. "It was like a slap in the face if you sit on these boards. We were blindsided."

Branson also said the simple fact that the parks takeover has created a new division within Guilford County government doesn't sit well with him.

"I'm not a big fan of growing the government," Branson said.

Last June, when the county adopted the 2012-2013 budget, the parks takeover was tacked on to the budget at the last minute. At that time, Commissioner Billy Yow pushed for a provision that the board would get to see a detailed breakdown of the supposed savings.

Though county staff did make a presentation on parks at a work session on Thursday, August 9, Yow complained then, and to this day – as have other commissioners – that the board never got the answers it requested.

Branson said that, when he was running for commissioner, he attended a number of commissioners meetings, including the August work session where staff gave the presentation on the parks takeover.

Like Yow, Branson said the level of detail that staff provided to the board at that meeting was highly unsatisfactory.

"I was at the meeting and I wasn't really impressed with the information they gave us," he said. "I'm very, very cautious about how it will work out."

Branson said that, even before the takeover was complete, it was easy to see county money starting to walk out the door.

"They've already spent money," he said pointing to maintenance costs recently brought to the board and an expensive new online facilities scheduling system that allows citizens to make reservations for park shelters, ball fields and other park facilities over the internet.

Trapp said the current situation reminds him of when he sat on a board that was created to study a potential merger of the planning boards and planning departments of the City of Greensboro and Guilford County. Those discussions were very active in late 2009 and in 2010 and Trapp said that, while there was optimism at first, when the group got down to crunching the actual numbers, it became evident that consolidating the two departments wouldn't lead to the hoped for savings.

"It wasn't going to save us any money," he said.

Trapp also said that, in the case of taking over the parks as well, he wants to see some hard evidence that the county is going to save money through the move.

Trapp said the board should look at all options when it comes to operating the parks.

"Everything is on the table," he said.

Henning, like Trapp and other commissioners, said he's open to the idea of continuing to run the parks in-house if it can be shown that the county actually does save money doing so. He said that's why he didn't make a motion to stop the merger before the Jan. 1 changeover. By the time the new nine-member Board of Commissioners with four new members took office, the county was only a few weeks away from the move.

Henning said it's not too late for the new board to address the matter.

"The train isn't too far out of the station," he said.

However, there's no question that the train did leave the station at midnight, Dec. 31.

Shaw said, "A year from now if it's not working out we can always go back to the way it was."

The assumption that the commissioners can just wave a magic wand and return things to the way they were is, of course, Panglossian. In this case, going back to the way things were is a lot more like putting toothpaste back in the tube than renewing a magazine subscription after a lapse.

The cities and towns that have been operating the parks have canceled contracts with vendors and made other changes; and there's certainly no guarantee that the cities and towns would want to take the employees back and go back to the previous arrangement – not to mention that those cities and towns now have a foul taste in their mouths from their prior dealings with the county regarding parks. Perhaps, if they do agree to run the parks for the county again, they might require more money to handle those services or demand a large deposit like landlords require for questionable tenants.

Woodard said that shifting parks operations back to the towns and cities would be a complex affair because the cities and towns had contracts with providers that have been dissolved as a result of the county taking over the duties.

Guilford County has seven parks that it owns in whole or in part. It owns Bur-Mil, Gibson, Guilford-Mackintosh, Hagan-Stone, Northeast and Southwest parks. Guilford County also co-owns Triad Park with Forsyth County.

Until this year, Guilford County was paying about $2.2 million a year to the cities and towns to maintain its parks.

Guilford County had been paying the City of Greensboro nearly $330,000 to run and maintain Bur-Mil Park and about $240,000 to do the same with Hagan-Stone Park. The county now runs those two parks as well as Gibson Park, which was previously managed by Jamestown, and Southwest and Northeast parks, which were both managed by Gibsonville.

The operation of Guilford-Mackintosh Park, currently handled by Burlington, and the operations at Triad Park, which is managed by Forsyth County, remain unchanged.

Before the county created the new parks manager position, it was assumed by some that Roger Bardsley, who now oversees the parks and has the title Guilford County parks planner, would be in charge of the 30 new employees, but clearly, if that ever was the plan, there's a new plan now.

When asked about the current situation, Bardsley said he was unable to shed much light on it.

"They don't tell me much," he said.

Former Commissioner Skip Alston was a strong supporter of Fox's move to take over the parks, but Alston is no longer on the board and Fox is stepping down as county manager at the end of this month.

Six members of that previous board are gone and there's a new board that is asking more questions – about parks and many other issues as well.