The Parks and Recreation Commission is ready to move forward with advertising the new beach and recreation director position approved at Town Meeting two weeks ago. At an Oct. 11 meeting, the commission agreed they would like to hire the new full-time director for Jan. 1.
There is only one problem—the funding sources Parks and Rec planned to use to pay the new hire for the first six months can be used only for beach director duties and beach expenses, leaving no money for the recreation director portion of the job.
Salaries and benefits for town employees are typically part of the budget that the town votes on at Spring Town Meeting, so the new combined position wouldn’t be funded by taxpayers until then, and those funds wouldn’t be available until July 1. To fill the gap until that date, Parks and Rec planned to pay the beach director portion of the job with unused money from last summer’s directorless beach.
The commission planned to finance recreation director duties with its beach revolving fund, which has a balance of over $100,000, but town code specifies only beach expenses can come out of that fund. Some of those duties, such as boat lottery registration and boat rentals, are beach-related. Parks and Rec Chair Bob O’Shea told the Press the fund could also be used to pay for new beach programs, such as a volleyball league, or bringing back old programs that Parks and Rec dropped because of lack of time, such as the popular “Ya Gotta Regatta.”
The new recreation director could not spend any time on fields, though, or on developing new recreation programs. O’Shea said small tasks, such as closing fields when the weather is bad, could be paid for out of the fields revolving account, which has a few thousand dollars in it. He said the new hire also might be able to come up with a program related to the fields that would self-fund some hours spent on recreation not related to the beach.
O’Shea said he’s frustrated that no one mentioned this limitation until the floor of Town Meeting, when the question of using the beach funds for general recreation was raised by Finance Committee Chair Jennifer Finch. The plan to fund the position until the new fiscal year started was spelled out in a July 8 email O’Shea sent to both Town Administrator Tim Bragan and Select Board Chair Rich Maiore. In that same email, O’Shea also asked for other possible approaches to funding; he said he received no response from either Bragan or Maiore.
Funding was also spelled out in the warrant article, which was reviewed weeks before Town Meeting by the Select Board and the Finance Committee. Surprisingly, even though Town Counsel Mark Lanza explained to Town Meeting that the funds specified in the warrant article could be expended only for the beach, voters supported the article as written. Maiore was absent from the meeting, and no one stepped up to question this complication, leaving O’Shea and town administration to figure out how to make it work.
That process is not going smoothly. Bragan told O’Shea in an email that if the issue is not resolved soon, the town will not be able to hire anyone other than a beach director in time for spring. That position would be less appealing to prospective hires. It would command a much lower salary—about $17,000 for the season— than the grade level 11 beach and recreation director position approved by the Personnel Board, which has a range of $81,000 to $110,000 annually, plus benefits.
O’Shea told the Press he will work with administration on a plan to make the combined beach and recreation director position viable with the funding sources available for a start date sometime between Jan. 1 and Apr. 1. But he added that if the town chooses to hire only a beach director in that time frame, he’ll quit. Town administration should be “helping departments be successful,” he said, “not throwing out roadblocks.”
