Two master agreements between the Emporia Recreation Commission and the Emporia City Commission were under discussion Wednesday when the two boards met for lunch.
The agreements seek to outline the management and maintenance responsibilities for the city’s recreation facilities as the rec commission considers requesting an additional two mills of funding from the Emporia school district.
“I think we’ll all agree that there’s not enough money to maintain things the way we’d like to,” said assistant city manager Mark McAnarney. “... Recreation facilities are an important component to quality of life, and we all want to have a good quality of life here.”
At issue is how the rec commission’s responsibilities have evolved over the decades to include the maintenance of parks and ball fields, responsibilities that drain money from recreational programming.
“We can’t continue doing what we do with the funds we have currently available,” said rec commissioner Roger Hartsook.
Emporia school superintendent John Heim said the school board wants agreements in place and wants to know how the money would be spent before it will consider giving more money.
“I think once that’s in place, I think they’ll be OK,” Heim said. “The board doesn’t want to get in the business of dictating recreation policy or programming.”
“What we have going on right now is not unique to the state of Kansas,” said Tom McEvoy, director of the Lee Beran Recreation Center. “A number of communities of similar size that have rec commissions have had their mill levies increased. The cities have done the maintenance and upkeep of the rec centers or the ball fields. They’ve come to the rec commissions to ask them to take over the maintenance and management of those facilities.”
McEvoy said that, in those cities, recreation commissions would not take over maintenance responsibilities without more money to support that.
“What we’ve done here, in this community, is backwards,” McEvoy said. “We’ve assumed these responsibilities and now we’re getting to the point where the funding we did have allocated for maintenance is impacting our programming.”