MORGANTOWN — When the Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners (BOPARC) took over operation of Morgantown’s parks in 1981, it had more employees and a fraction of the current roster of facilities and programs to oversee.
BOPARC Executive Director Melissa Wiles and Assistant Director Marissa Travinski laid out the city’s recreational challenges during Tuesday’s Morgantown City Council Committee of the Whole meeting.
They portrayed a chronically underfunded agency often left shifting funds on the fly, in order to keep up with decades-old facilities, like the 60-year-old Marilla Pool, the 40-year-old Krepps Pool and an aging ice rink.
“It’s quite safe to say our system has grown over the last four decades. The problem is our ratio of funding and staff size as compared to that growth, it just has not kept up,” Wiles said. “This is the reality of your park system.”
BOPARC has an operating budget of about $3.3 million. Roughly $1.3 million, or 39 percent, comes from the city. A similar amount is generated through fees to use BOPARC facilities and the rest is a combination of grants, sponsorships and other funding sources.
BOPARC is also part of a five-year, county parks and recreation levy that generates $455,000 annually specifically for improvements to the Morgantown Ice Arena, located on Mississippi Street.
In her four-part plan aimed at bolstering the bottom line, Wiles said the agency must designate a dedicated and adequate funding mechanism.
She didn’t explain exactly how much money is needed or the city’s preferred method of securing it. Among the options? Increased taxes, a dedicated tax levy or user fee funds.
Wiles claims the necessary funding won’t be generated by raising admission fees, tinkering with concession menus or reworking contracts with the various instructors BOPARC uses.
“We cannot recoup money by raising admission rates. Would you pay $10 to get into Marilla Pool? Nope. We’re in a situation where we’re tapped out as to what we can charge our patrons to enter facilities that are either approaching a half-century old or over a half-century old,” Wiles said. “So that’s where we are.”
The Monongalia County Commission provided $50,000 to this year’s BOPARC budget. It was earmarked for a specific program — in this case a summer concert series — in keeping with the commission’s stipulations for outside funding requests.
Wiles said at some facilities up to half the patrons are county residents.
Deputy Mayor Mark Brazaitis said the setup isn’t equitable to city residents whom he believes are subsidizing facilities for non-residents.
“Any person who walks into Krepps Pool or the ice rink and is a city resident really is paying more for that service because they’ve already paid for it with their taxes,” Brazaitis said, floating the idea of an identification card for city residents that could potentially allow lower admission rates through BOPARC and other perks.
Wiles said BOPARC has never had separate fees for city residents and non-residents.
City Manager Paul Brake said the BOPARC issues have taken years to compound and won’t be undone quickly.
He said the work begins now to isolate personnel and capital improvement needs and formulate a plan to meet them, likely as part of the 2019-’20 budgeting.
“There’s not some pot of money that we’ll throw at this and make all these problems go away,” Brake said. “We really need to look at a financially sustainable solution. I think this begins the conversation.”
