PORT TOWNSEND — While 13 of cash-strapped Jefferson County’s parks are staffed with volunteers to maintain them, the toilet is closed and the raggedy grass is thick with dandelions at North Beach County Park.
That’s why Jefferson County’s newly founded Adopt-A-Park program is seeking volunteers to maintain the restroom, now replaced by a portable toilet, clean up trash and mow the grass at North Beach Park at the end of Kuhn Street.
That park is a scenic gateway to Port Townsend’s shorelines overlooking Admiralty Inlet and is connected to a trail leading into Fort Worden State Park.
“It needs a toilet cleaner. Until then we are using a port-a-potty,” Matt Tyler, parks and recreation manage, told the county commissioners Monday, explaining the upside and downside of volunteer park maintenance.
“The problem is some of the work is quite unpleasant.”
For park lovers
But Tyler said volunteers who love the park and want it kept up need to come forward and contact Tyler at 360-385-9160,
Jane Storm, Jefferson County Friends of Parks and Recreation president, at 360-385-2291, should be contacted for donations, he said.
Cleaning vaulted toilets has not stopped volunteers at other county parks, especially Memorial Field in downtown Port Townsend where the newly formed Friends of Parks and Recreation plans its first monthly Friday Fix Up on April 23.
Fund-raising concerts and an auction are also planned this summer.
Tyler and two other remaining parks staffers have stepped up the drive for parks maintenance volunteers since the county late last year, citing more than a $100,000 revenue shortfall, proposed closing four parks and laying off three part-time staffers.
The move left just one paid staffer for parks maintenance countywide.
‘Shaken up’
“It’s kind of shaken us up a bit as a department,” Tyler said Monday during the commissioners’ morning meeting in their county courthouse chambers.
Tyler added that he has made more connections with the community and schools to help bring a volunteer parks maintenance system together.
Tyler and Friends of Park and Recreation have issued a challenge to the community for donations to raise money to bring back the free after-school “drop-in” recreation program, shut down late last year, for children at the Port Townsend Community Center uptown.
To reopen the program Sept. 2, $15,277 for three months of programs needs to be raised by Aug. 1, Tyler said.
“It takes a lot of work” to manage parks volunteer programs, County Commissioner David Sullivan, D-Cape George said, recognizing Tyler’s efforts.
Sullivan’s fellow Democratic commissioners, John Austin of Port Ludlow and Phil Johnson of Port Townsend agreed.
Johnson said at age 13, he was the first volunteer to mow North Beach County Park when it opened.
“I struggled and found that this was way too much lawn to mow,” he joked.
Adopt-A-Park
Tyler’s presentation also cited that Adopt-A-Park program and Memorial Field Cooperative donated 936 volunteer hours during the first quarter of this year, a dollar value of about $18,720.
He said the work has saved the county about $3,500 on equipment.
He estimated that this year about 3,600 volunteer hours would be donated to maintain county parks.
Program volunteers have donated about 2,654 hours.
All hours volunteered this year would be valued at about $125,080, he reported.
________
Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
