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MetroParks tensions on display in email exchange
CANFIELD
Mill Creek Park Emails
Document
A string of emails between Mill Creek MetroParks’ executive director and two board members highlight divisions in park leaders.
Tensions between Mill Creek MetroParks leaders, which have simmered at recent board meetings, erupted in an email exchange shared with The Vindicator.
A strongly worded message from board member Tom Shipka to Executive Director Aaron Young elicited this sharp response from Young on Friday: “I have done nothing to warrant the level of disrespect and insult that I have been shown from individuals who have been appointed to lead a park district of which they have never been to a respective Board Meeting until after their appointment and whom also have only attempted an elementary and remedial review of the available facts and information that have gotten us to this point.”
“We all need to have a very frank conversation about the lack of professionalism that is being shown to myself as an individual,” Young wrote in an email sent to MetroParks board members, Mahoning County Probate Judge Robert N. Rusu Jr., several park employees and Vindicator Editor Todd Franko.
Young went on to note his attempts “to turn around a MetroPark system that has had 15 years of mismanagement, insufficient leadership and funding.”
Young’s ire was raised by a Thursday night email in which Shipka, appointed to the board last month, ordered him to immediately make improvements to the Volney Rogers Field area.
“I was appalled,” Shipka said of the facility’s condition. “The tennis courts have cracks along all of them, the white lines haven’t been painted in years, and the fences haven’t been painted in years. ... I want this situation changed right now!”
Shipka added this postscript: “I don’t want to hear about budgetary issues. Do it NOW, dammit!”
He also offered to donate $1,000 toward the repair work. He later sent a revised, toned-down email that asked “that this miserable situation be corrected immediately.”
Young was affronted, he said, not only by the tone of the original missive, but by its contents.
“I did a walk-through of that facility in March of this year, and identified that the facility was not up to the standard the Mahoning Valley should expect from their MetroParks,” Young told The Vindicator. He also provided documentation to support his claim and his plans to remedy the situation.
A capital-improvements plan requested by The Vindicator several months ago indicates, as Young noted Friday, that the MetroParks has budgeted $120,000 to complete a project at Volney Rogers Field in 2017.
“Which is the very first year of the new levy cycle that will provide us with the additional funds to tackle these types of things,” Young said. “All of those things could have been answered with a question.”
Shipka, however, was not swayed.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he told The Vindicator.
Asked also about Young’s charge that his email lacked professionalism, Shipka pointed to his emailed response.
It reads: “I offer no apology to anyone for the Park leadership’s failure to remedy the deplorable condition of the Volney Rogers tennis courts and basketball court that I witnessed yesterday. Voters passed a levy to maintain and improve the Park. As a voter and a board member, I expect results, not, ‘We’re going to get to it eventually. Be patient.’
“We terminated 18 or more employees, then bought three new Jeeps, then marginalized the board by giving the executive director complete control over all aspects of the Park.”
He added this comment directed at Young: “In recent memory I have seen no better example of a ‘lack of professionalism’ than firing a respected 31-year employee without prior notice and sending Park police to ‘escort’ him from his work site.”
Young contends that the capital-improvement needs being discussed are the very reason staff cuts were needed.
“It appears that people are just now seeing what I have been attempting to convey for the past 18 months, is that the MetroParks facilities and support amenities are at a critical juncture and that an internal reorganization and subsequent reduction in overhead expenditures was the only option to free up the necessary financial resources in the last year of a levy cycle,” he wrote.
Other park leaders waded into the fray as well, with Shipka and board member Robert Durick exchanging pointed remarks via email.
Durick took Shipka to task for the wording of his message, writing: “Dr. Shipka, I have known of you for many years and have only the utmost respect for someone who taught for many years at YSU and is so well-written. This email last night was NOT one of your better literary pieces. ... Your demanding nature and your tone is not very professional and frankly, sir, you need to step up and apologize.”
Shipka, in turn, chastised Durick for not addressing perceived neglect of park facilities during his tenure on the board.
“Dr. Durick, you said that you were on the Board seven years. Did you not see the deterioration of parts such as the Volney Rogers tennis courts and basketball court? Did you do anything to impede the deterioration?” he wrote. “Don’t tell a new Board member to sit quietly and learn; the reason I applied for a Board position is that I concluded that the Park is in trouble. I am on the Board to clean up the mess that exists. If you think things are fine, you need to resign.”
Durick said he has no plans to resign.
Durick also expressed his unequivocal support of Young. Shipka has made it clear he’s not ready to do that.
“I want to give Aaron a chance to show me that he needs to stay on in his role, and I have been very patient and cautious in waiting to gain enough evidence to form a judgment,” he said. “I’m forming an opinion. It’s not finalized.”
Young could not speculate about Shipka’s impact on his future with the park, but said: “I am confident that the actions and the efforts I have taken in the 18 months [that he’s been executive director] are in the best interests of the MetroParks, in both the short and long term, and those actions have all been made available to each respective board member as we’ve moved along.”
The board will meet for a special meeting at 5 p.m. Monday to take a tour of the park’s properties and facilities. That tour was planned well before this issue came up Thursday, Young said.