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MetroParks officials take trolley tour through Mill Creek Park
YOUNGSTOWN
Tempers that were on display in a tense email exchange between Mill Creek MetroParks officials late last week seemed to have cooled by Monday, when park board and staff members took a trolley tour of park properties and facilities together.
During the two-hour session, planned some time ago to give board members a better overview of the park system, MetroParks officials shared laughs, traded polite comments and quizzed park staff members on various park features included in the tour.
Starting at Ford Nature Center, the tour looped around all three park lakes and made stops at project sites, Fellows Riverside Gardens, the Lily Pond, golf course, Wick Recreation Area and other prominent park holdings.
“The objective was to share with them a firsthand experience of the assets of Mill Creek Park, talk a little bit about its age, and what its age and success have meant to us as management,” said MetroParks Executive Director Aaron Young.
A theme that came up again and again during the tour, which was led by MetroParks Planning Manager Justin Rogers, was the park’s past success in acquiring third-party dollars to fund capital improvements. Rogers noted, for example, that a recent rehabilitation of the Lily Pond’s parking lot was 100 percent funded by a grant.
That information about funding sources was one of the main takeaways for new board member Tom Shipka, who caused a stir among park officials last week with a strongly worded directive to Young about one park facility.
Shipka was pleased with the tour, saying, “I’ve known all of the sites we visited well, but I got a lot more background information than I had before about funding, vegetation and the history.”
Rogers noted the park is focused on reinvesting in its infrastructure. Asked about the park’s use of outside funding sources, Young said the park now can be more self-sufficient.
“In the past, we didn’t have the opportunity to address some of those things ourselves,” he said. “With the support of people, and thanks to the levy approved in 2015, we have some additional financial resources that will make us less dependent on third-party sources – but it certainly doesn’t take away the need to go after those third-party sources, because we have a lot of infrastructure.”
Other themes of the tour were the diversity of the park system’s holdings – which span 4,000-plus acres at a dozen facilities across Mahoning County – and the park’s efforts to address water quality.
“This is something the MetroParks has been actively involved in for 20 years,” Rogers said of the water issue, noting the challenge of being at the farthest spot downstream in the Mill Creek Watershed.
Board members offered several ideas as well, with Shipka advocating for construction of additional restroom facilities throughout the park and improvements to sand bunkers at the golf course.
New board member Lee Frey found the tour to be helpful.
“It was a great experience, and I thank all the department heads who were here,” he said. “It was a wonderful overview, and I got many questions answered in a very straightforward manner.
“When you’re the new kid on the block, you want to learn everything you can.”
The next park board meeting is at 6 p.m. Aug. 15 at the MetroParks Farm in Canfield.