5.5. SR 06-25-2001 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Having community recreation become city recreation would not be a big adjustment in our management of activities and programs. It is expected that after city hall's expansion in 2004 that we would be looking at a park and recreation director position and department of which city recreafon would be one component. It has been requested that if community recreation became city recreation that we would offer a menu of services to neighboring municipalities and they would pick and choose what services they wanted for the price that was proposed. If the price was not acceptable or if the city preferred not to contract for the service, then these neighboring municipalities have lots of other options. They could do nothing and have their residents pay non-resident fees to attend our programs (or they could pay the extra fee for their residents); they could work together to provide services; each individual community could do their own recreation; or they could contract with community education. While it is clear that community education is not in the recreation business, for example offering T-ball, however there are a lot of gray areas and there may be some programs that the school district could provide which the communifes want under community education. One of the key issues in the establishment of the community recreational organization in 1992 was providing assistance to the youth associations. Participants in the youth associations come from throughout the school district and coordination of field scheduling for games and pracfces was an issue. In the early 1990's, almost all the fields were in Elk River. In general, community recreation wanted to relieve the administrative responsibilities from the youth associations so they could concentrate on coaching and working with the kids. This is still our position, but with the evolution of the Rogers school system and the anticipated Rogers athletic association it seems that operations are becoming more fragmented and it may be more appropriate for Elk River to concentrate only on scheduling fields and facilities for which we either own or have maintenance responsibilities. Relationships have been established with youth associations so I am confident that we will have a seamless transition between community recreation and city recreation and that if the associations have to deal with other municipalities then this should not be a major challenge or obstacle. The finances are the grayest area to deal within discussing community recreation becoming city recreation. Clearly if we are 84% of the administration fees then we should take the next step and be 100% responsible. Attached is some financial information on community recreation administration fees and total city recreation expenditures. We do believe that we'll receive additional revenue from non-resident fees and that we may receive revenue for contractual services without significantly increasing expenditures. However, we have not had time to analyze the figures so any comments are simply speculative. There has not been too much time to put together a great deal of information on this issue. This has been a busy week with the police union arbitration meeting and with putting together the draft 2002 budget. Accordingly, after this June 25 council review of community recreation issues, hopefully staff can get some direction and a follow-up City Council discussion can take place on either July 2, or July 9.