Significant Cuts Coming to Inver Grove Heights Park System?

City staff say the parks system needs $8.5 million in maintenance over the next 20 years, but several Inver Grove Heights City Council members aren't so sure.

"I think we’ve got to start taking a look at our parks and all we’re spending on them," Councilor Bill Klein said on Tuesday. "We can’t do everything any more, I think that time is long gone."

After tabling the , the council again took up the issue during a work session on Monday night. At stake is the state of the city's 590-acre park system, which includes 25 parks.

In 1998, the city established the Park Maintenance Fund as a way to address the replacement of park amenities and infrastructure, including playgrounds, sports fields and buildings. But for the last several years, the city has only allocated $83,000 annually to the fund—a number that is far short of the roughly $504,000 in annual funding that Parks and Recreation Director Eric Carlson says the aging system will need.

Under a proposal presented earlier this summer 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 20 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.

On Monday, Klein proposed removing playgrounds and other amenities from some parks, allowing community members to use park space for gardens or even returning under-utilized parks to "wild space" as alternatives to reduce the future cost of park maintenance.

While Mayor George Tourville rejected the idea of converting any city parks back into wild space, he, too, acknowledged that he has concerns about drawing so much money from the city's general fund to pay for park replacements.

Under the plan, the city would take a maximum of $300,000 annually from the general fund for park improvements. Tourville said he would like to limit that annual amount to $150,000 and find alternative sources to make up at least part of the difference. Councilors also expressed reservations about drawing so much money from the Host Community Fund, which is comprised of money the city receives in return for hosting Pine Bend Sanitary Landfill.

The city's general fund is funded primarily through taxpayer dollars.

"I think the general fund should pay some into to it, because everyone while they're here in Inver Grove has the opportunity to partake in the [park] amenities," Tourville said on Tuesday. "I think that for right now, with the economy the way it is, we should hold it to a minimum out of the general fund."

Tourville and Klein agreed that the city's Parks and Recreation Department should begin holding meetings with city residents to discuss park use. Doing so, Klein suggested, would help the city assess the need for certain park facilities, and help staff identify under-used park amenities that could be reduced or removed.

How much the city will end up cutting from the parks system—if anything at all—will largely depend on what the community is willing to support in taxes, Carlson said. Because of the budget crunch, the city has deferred maintenance on some of its park facilities for years, and those facilities may be rendered unusable if the condition of playgrounds and other amenities continues to deteriorate unabated.

Another council member, Rosemary Piekarski Krech, said during the work session that the city needs to balance its spending between the park system and other vital city services.

"We need to keep the roads drivable, we need to provide for health and safety, and yet you don’t have a decent community unless you have some decent amenities also," Piekarski Krech said.