Aging Parks System Needs $8.5 Million, City Officials Say

Cracks in the tennis courts at . Gathering rust on playground equipment in . A 40-year-old recreation building in .

There’s no doubt that the city’s park infrastructure is showing its age, according to Parks and Recreation Director Eric Carlson. The only question, Carlson said, is where the city is going to get the money it needs to maintain and repair its playgrounds, sports fields and other recreation facilities.

The city has 25 parks and over $9.8 million in park assets and improvements, including playgrounds, basketball courts, trails, ice rinks and other amenities. But Inver Grove Heights, hit by budget cuts, has for years deferred park maintenance, repair and replacement, Carlson said. Now, the city’s park system needs as much as $8.5 million over the next 19 years to fully address its maintenance needs, Carlson believes.

At the core of the issue is the city’s parks maintenance fund—money designated for repairs to park amenities. For the last several years, the city has injected the fund with $83,000 from the city’s general fund—a number that is not nearly adequate to address the park system’s growing needs, Carlson said. Instead, the city should set aside as much as $504,000 annually through 2030 to keep its park amenities in healthy condition, Carlson said. If the city doesn’t address its parks maintenance issues, he added, Inver Grove Heights may be forced to retire or remove some of its recreation amenities.

“We’ve have $9.8 million in assets and we’ve only been putting away $83,000 a year,” Carlson said. “We haven’t had the resources to take care of everything that’s starting to age, and so we’ve been very, very diligent and conscious of the resources that we had and put things off. There comes a day when you can’t make it last any longer and it needs to be replaced.”

Under a proposal presented last week by Carlson, the city would siphon $3 million from the Host Communities Fund, $4.28 million from the general fund and $1.15 million from the capital facilities fund over the next 19 years for the city’s park maintenance fund. The city would also use $256,000 generated from the sale of to round out the parks maintenance fund.

The Host Community Fund is comprised of money the city receives in return for hosting Pine Bend Sanitary Landfill, City Administrator Joe Lynch said. In 2010, the landfill generated roughly $2.9 million in revenue and had a cash balance of $4.57 million, according to city documents. The city uses the money in the fund for a variety of purposes, Lynch said, including subsidizing Veterans Memorial Community Center, paying for road improvements and supporting a community band, among other uses.

The city’s capital facilities fund is used to make upgrades, repairs and remodels to city facilities, Lynch added. The city isn’t necessarily committing $8.5 million to parks maintenance Lynch and Carlson added; city officials would evaluate the continued need for certain park facilities before choosing whether to replace or renovate them.

Several Inver Grove Heights City Council members said at a council work session last week that the city must balance the needs of the parks facilities with the needs of other necessary city services, including streets maintenance and police and fire services.

“If we’re going to take $3 million and some dollars [from the Host Community Fund], maybe that would be better spent fixing our streets or taking care of our infrastructure?” asked Councilor Rosemary Piekarski Krech, who called the $8.5 million plan too “aggressive.”

 “You can’t let [park amenities] go away to the point of not being to be used,” responded Mayor George Tourville. “You need a balance of fixing the infrastructure, you need a balance of taking caring of the parks.”

“The way the country is going, if things don’t change, we’re going to have to cut back,” Councilor Dennis Madden replied. “We need to be in a position where we can cut back on things.”