Volunteers pitch in for parks, but mayor says help is coming

When the city of Colorado Springs removed 396 trash cans from 198 parks and open spaces in March, the situation for the city’s recreational areas began to go downhill. Making matters worse, the number of park maintenance workers was slashed by two-thirds because of budget cuts.

In the wake of the cuts, individuals and organizations around Colorado Springs have stepped in to keep these areas clean. But their efforts are hardly all-encompassing, serving as more of a temporary stopgap. And volunteers say they can’t replace the city’s employees forever.

In his State of the City speech last month, Colorado Springs Mayor Lionel Rivera offered some promising news for parks and open spaces, announcing a recycling plan that is expected to replace garbage cans with new trash and recycling receptacles as early as this fall.

According to the plan, receptacles will be donated by New Jersey-based Greener Corners, and weekly disposal will be paid by selling advertising on the bins and collecting recycling items.

Until the program takes effect, trash disposal in the parks is up to volunteers and nearby neighbors. While their work is encouraging, most volunteers aren’t looking to take on the job of maintaining a whole park day after day, said Kurt Schroeder maintenance manager for the city’s parks department.

“It’s rewarding to see people care and be willing to do a lot of the dirty work out there,” he said. “The challenge is to keep them engaged. It’s a little harder to get people to commit to long-term responsibilities.”

The budget cuts have had mixed effects, said Susan Davies, executive director of the Trails and Open Space Coalition. The nonprofit works to maintain and preserve parks and open spaces around the region. The city’s staff cuts and trash can removals affected open spaces as well.  

“In a lot of ways, there are good things coming out of budget cuts.  We have to rethink and recreate how we do things,” Davies said. The coalition, for example, is heading the

Sustainable Parks Initiative to corral citizen support into organized volunteer efforts for the city’s open spaces. Progress is slow, though, because leaders with experience in park management, many from the various friends groups, are few and overstretched.   

“People are stepping up,” she said, “but in the long run, can we volunteers take the place of city parks experienced workers?  No.”

In neighborhood parks, efforts mounted by residents are keeping a few parks from becoming dried up, overgrown and trash filled.     

One of the biggest and most publicized projects, mentioned by Rivera in his speech, is Proud of Our Parks. Led by Steve Immel, the citizen-driven initiative solicits help from volunteers, donors and sponsors to return trash cans and trash collection to parks. So far, the organization has put 151 trash cans back into parks, a little less than half the number  removed.  

Immel said that while the Proud of Our Parks model could be applied to all parks, it would take a lot of work, and at this point, the organization isn’t set up for long-term operation as a nonprofit. He said assumed the program would be a short-term venture until the city emerged from the budget crisis.  

In one of the parks that has not received Proud of our Parks help, Patricia Rutledge has taken matters into her own hands.  

Tired of seeing Erindale Park treated like a toilet, Rutledge started picking up dog poop left by other dog owners. At one time, she was picking up more than 30 piles a day.
Her neighbor Ester Miller said that Rutledge would probably continue to find lots of dog poop in the park as long as the trash cans remain absent.  

She said she didn’t blame people for not wanting to haul the stinky parcels home.

“If we had a trash can here, it would be a motivator for people to clean up and throw away their poop bags,” she said while walking her two dogs at Erindale.    

At Old Farm Park, when Allison Foster heard the city was cutting park services, she organized volunteers and donations to clean up and pay for more water at the two-acre park in northeast Colorado Springs.  Despite receiving more than 70 responses, she doesn’t see the neighborhood’s efforts lasting much longer.  

“You can’t maintain services like that on volunteers alone forever,” she said.  “Right now, it’s easy to manage because we have so many volunteers and need only very small donations, but people move in and out, they get busy.”  

Jeff Gaddy hopes to create a more permanent plan to keep the parks beautiful. Gaddy is the founder of Pristine Parks Project, a national effort to inspire local businesses and individuals to make a long-term commitment to clean up parks.  A resident of Oakland, Calif., Gaddy stopped in Colorado Springs in late June to see a friend and in his spare time tried to organize periodic cleanups of Boulder Park and Memorial Park .  

As of last week though, Gaddy had met only a few interested individuals and hadn’t yet received promises of support from local businesses. He has spent more than $1,000 on the project so far and is still paying individuals $20 out of his pocket for each garbage bag of trash they collect.  

The lack of trash cans doesn’t help his cause.

“There are signs asking people to take trash out of the parks themselves, but that’s not going to happen,” he said.  “It’s hard enough to get people to put trash in the receptacles.”
If residents don’t want to lose the quality of their parks and open spaces, they will have to be willing to increase their property taxes to pay for them, Davies said.  

The ideal solution for parks, she said, would be a dedicated fund to operate and maintain parks, like the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, where the money could be used only to maintain divisions like parks, cultural services and museums.
    
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Contact the writer at 636-0187.