Q&A: Rochester Parks and Rec director makes the case for ballot measure

Among the dozens of options appearing on the 2020 ballot in Rochester, there’s a box to be filled that won’t elect any person to office. Rather, it’s a question asked directly to voters:

Shall the City of Rochester, Minnesota, be authorized to levy property taxes in the amount of $2,000,000 to provide a dedicated source of funding to protect water quality and natural areas; conserve trees and wooded areas that help to protect air quality; improve access to existing parks and recreational facilities for kids and people with disabilities; improve park safety; and maintain, operate, and improve existing parks?

If a majority of Rochester’s voters say ‘yes,’ Parks and Rec will get up to $2 million per year in additional funding. As a result, the average property tax bill would go up by $33 in 2021. 

We talked with Paul Widman, director of Rochester Parks and Recreation, about the details of the referendum: why it’s on the ballot now, what the new funds would go to, and how the pandemic affected the park system over the summer of 2020, as the details of the referendum were being crafted. The highlights of our conversation are below.

MCB: First off, why is Parks and Rec requesting this money?

Widman: This goes back to our master planning that we did in 2015. It was the first system-wide plan that this department had ever done, and it was long overdue. We found that we have aging infrastructure that’s been neglected for years. There’s amenities in the system that are outdated — think of basketball courts and tennis courts in a lot of our neighborhood parks. Our outdoor pools are outdated. These are just a few examples, by the way; there are numerous projects that we identified.

Overall, we found we needed to do $80 million worth of repairs to bring the system up to date, and improve all those things that we’ve allowed to deteriorate over the past few years. It also addresses growth in the community, and allows us to build a couple of new amenities that people have been asking for. We’ve been whittling away over the past few years through the funding that we’ve received; more specifically through state funding for regional parks [i.e. Cascade Lake], improvements to Soldiers Field, and playground updates. To really address these problems with any sort of impact, we know we need a new revenue source. 

MCB: Covid-19 has come down hard on businesses and organizations all over, and I imagine yours is no different — especially with gyms closed for months and people wanting to get their exercise outdoors. How has the pandemic affected Rochester’s park system?

Widman: Participation in the park and (especially) trail system has spiked through the pandemic. The Trust for Public Land did some polling of registered voters earlier this year, just to see what the likelihood of any funding measure passing would be, and it came back really positive. From the public comments we’ve heard over the past year, people seem to be discovering parks beyond their own neighborhood. To me, that’s all just coalesced — yeah, we’re going through a tough time, but we’re still getting a lot of good feedback and hearing a lot of ideas of what people would like to see. 

MCB: That's an interesting dichotomy right now. It's a tough financial time for a lot of people, but I know people are using the park system more than ever before. So usage is up, but revenues are down.

Widman: It’s a challenging time, but it’s also a time when a lot of people are thinking about and using the park system. We lost $1.7 million from our operating budget this year, and that took away nearly all of our seasonal employees that do the mowing and general upkeep. Our full-time staff picked up a lot of the slack, switching gears from long-term projects to doing some mowing and field prep. 

I wouldn’t want to do this pandemic thing again, but it’s helped folks understand some of our challenges and has shifted the dynamic a little bit. I think we’ve connected with a lot more residents than we normally do in a given year.

MCB: The question on the ballot lists five focus areas that the funding would go to, if approved. Can you specify what projects are first on the list to receive funds?

Widman: The obvious one is, in some ways, a choice that’s been made for us. We’re at the very end of the life of Silver Lake Pool.There’s a lot of different ideas about how to handle this, but the truth is that the pool shell is in great shape — concrete was cheap back in the 50s — but the locker room and bathhouse are both way, way outdated. I could g- on with this, but we’ve simply determined it’s time to move on. Our master plan calls for replacing that pool with an interactive water feature. Being that the pool is in a park that’s more of a destination for residents, that could be a number of things — maybe a splash pad, maybe it’s a stream built for young kids,or a combination of both — that rises to the top priority. We hear constantly from residents that they want a splash pad.

Beyond that, we’d be looking at amenities similar to Silver Lake that are outdated, and that we’ve run out of options to update. The first thing that comes to mind there are our picnic shelters, specifically ones that have restrooms — those need major attention. The one at Cook Park sticks out right away for me. Even after that, there’s so many tennis and basketball courts across the city that need attention. Some of these courts have cracks in them that are so big it’s not very feasible to play, and it’s long overdue for us to fix those problems.

MCB: We’ve heard from some people that they support increased funding for the parks... just not right now, in the middle of an economic downturn. Why put this referendum on the ballot now?

Widman: Well, we were all excited and geared up at the end of 2019 to bring this to the council and talk about public funding options for the park system, based on over a year of work with the Trust [for Public Land]. We were on the study session agenda for late March, to present some viable options and move into action… and the pandemic hit just as we were preparing to present to the council. My first reaction was ‘ugh, this’ll be another three to five years,’ but we stayed on the council agenda and tweaked our approach a little bit. It was more about asking the council ‘what do you want to do?,’ because if I didn’t bring it forward, then it would be me making the final decision on this referendum. I wanted the council to weigh in on it. 

At that point, most of the council said they wanted to see some public polling, just to check how residents felt about the whole thing. We took that step, and the results came back pretty favorable. We wouldn’t want to stand in the way of something the community wants to do. As far as timing goes, I would say the knee-jerk reaction is that it’s not the best time to put something like this forward. But when you dig into the details — the polling data, looking around and seeing that more people are discovering the parks, it makes sense. This was one of the least painful options — the average homeowner will pay $30 more on their taxes.

Back in 2019, we were actually thinking about requesting a larger number (around $4-5 million), just because of our needs, but we adjusted [before the pandemic]. We wanted to find a number that would help us solve some problems, but not hit our homeowners too hard. The folks from the Trust recommended the $2 million option, and I agreed. It doesn’t allow us to do everything at once, but we would definitely be in better shape than we’ve been in years past.

Isaac Jahns is a Rochester native and a 2019 graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. He reports on politics, business and music for Med City Beat.