Council approves changes to parks board, keeps maintenance review in board’s purview

Blaine City Council unanimously voted 5-0 during its May 23 meeting to approve changes to the city’s park and cemetery board but will keep maintenance review in the board’s purview. The vote comes after a spirited debate during the last city council meeting on limiting the parks board’s involvement in managing the parks and its budget.

Councilmembers Mike Hill and Garth Baldwin were absent from the vote, although Baldwin had been at the parks study session earlier that evening.

Councilmembers were asked to vote on Resolution 22-2982 that revised language in Blaine’s municipal code. City staff recommended reducing the board’s involvement in maintaining and managing city parks so the board could work more on development. Both council and parks board members pushed back on this recommendation and council chose not to include it in the new parks changes.

Staff recommended the parks board continue proposing a six-year capital improvement plan each year, but no longer make operational budget recommendations. The budget change was proposed because development is funded through the capital budget, while the operational budget has become more limited since pandemic budget cuts and staff would be better suited to handle that budget. Council agreed to this change.

City staff recommended adding one councilmember to the group of five voting board members, which council decided to make non-voting.

Staff had recommended cutting the number of meetings from 10 to four, and adding meetings if needed. Council opposed this and said it would be easier to keep the same number of meetings and drop them. Parks board representatives recommended having one meeting per month to the city, but councilmembers agreed 10 meetings were sufficient.

Park and cemetery board chairman Bob Kirby said during the study session he was aware city staff had a tough job trying to allocate resources for projects. He added the city would need more eyes and ears on parks as the population grows.

“I think we’re pretty much all saying the same thing and I think there’s a huge amount of agreement here,” Kirby said. “Semantics need to be ironed out. The idea that we would not have oversight on the maintenance function makes no sense to me. The heart and soul of most parks are around
maintenance.”

Councilmembers said the parks board could make visionary requests for parks but the city would need to decide if those requests could be budgeted.

“I think they can have the vision of what they would like to see and recommendations of where our focus should be and suggestions for what we should add or subtract from the parks,” mayor Mary Lou Steward said. “But in order to be involved with the budget, they’d need to be on the finance committee to understand where we are as a city and what our financial priorities are.”