Maintenance of our City’s Parks is a Bridge Too Far

Parks and Recreation has been spending a considerable amount of energy lately, between their big PR push to justify their last costly mistake (Hillcrest Park’s poorly constructed and unneeded stairs) and obtaining approval for the next one (Hillcrest Park’s unneeded bridge across the creek).

Do you know what Parks & Recreation have been paying less attention to? Their parks.

Residents have been complaining for several months about the condition of Rolling Hills Park’s playground and equipment. The issues run from routine maintenance like unpainted benches to hazards like this:

And this:

Hey, kids! This is what our City Manager’s car looked like after he totaled it!

Phone calls and letters to Parks & Recreation were ignored for months until residents went over Hugo Curiel’s head and appealed to the Commissioners directly, at which time they finally saw results.

Well, sort of. The benches have been repainted, but that rickety play truck is unchanged. Meanwhile, the broken spinner was simply been removed, along with an unsafe climber that had split in two. Before removing the climber outright, however, this was Parks & Recreation’s solution:

Which worked out about as well as anyone who’s ever had a five year old could have told them it would.

This right here is the hidden cost of our wasteful policies at  City Hall: we get stairs and bridges we didn’t ask for or want, but we do not get well maintained parks or working playground equipment (aka recreation) for our children that we expect. Our government in a nutshell.

14 Replies to “Maintenance of our City’s Parks is a Bridge Too Far”

  1. Maintenance is boring. Hugo needs some big projects on his resume because a new, non-Felzian city manager will demote or fire him.

  2. Gretchen Beatty should have jumped on this; among her other titles and duties is Risk Manager/Risk Management and she’s been doing that for probably 15 years!

    1. Where’s Gretchen Cox?

      Oh. Right. Defending bridges to no where and not little kids at dangerous parks.

      Jennifer must be proud.

  3. Maintenance? Here’s how Parks and Rec handles maintenance. Take a walk down Harbor where the new useless bridge will be built and take a close look at the existing iron railing. It probably hasn’t been painted since it was installed and is covered with rust, particularly where the vertical posts go into the concrete sidewalk. The solution to maintenance is to simply tear it out and build something much more expensive and totally unneeded. This way, Hugo can brag about how much money he saved the city by eliminating the labor intensive maintenance of the old sidewalk railing. After all, if you have a pot of money, you sure don’t want to spend it on hidden things like painting a sidewalk railing. No one will notice and there won’t be a nice brass plaque with Hugos name prominently displayed.

    1. Perhaps it wasn’t too practical to leave as is, but I do miss the Pacific Electric bridge seen at the top of the picture.

  4. It’s been this way forever. The present idiot learned his trader from Felz. And Felz learned from the completely obnoxious Susan Hunt: forget maintenance, build projects – especially if you can charge people to use them; and oh yeah – screw the public.

  5. wait until the fake grass installations start to reveal their short life in a few years. By then no one will remember how hard the Parks and Rec staffers got lobbied by the manufacturers to install “sick turf”
    http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/artificial-turf-debate/how-safe-artificial-turf-your-child-plays-n220166
    All the staffers (including that fat-ass, lazy, lying, crooked bitch Alice Loya) will be retired with 6 figure pensions and no one will ever be held accountable for the fraud.

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