MORGANTOWN — The space, the people and the vision.
That, Rachel Mitchell explained, is the recipe for success when it comes to addressing food insecurity.
And all three ingredients can be found at the Mon County Center, in Mylan Park.
Mitchell, the venue’s manager, said the county facility has become a model for the state and beyond since it was dedicated in 2019.
And at its heart, is the Community Food Innovation Center, a community kitchen for rent and the base from which Healthy Kids Inc. provides healthy, regionally-sourced food to area day care centers and other public and private entities.
The county is preparing an expansion of the kitchen that will build out an area focused on food preservation.
“With our high tunnels and our kitchen we hope to incorporate regional agriculture at an educational level, so we can teach people how to grow. We can teach people how to harvest, how to prepare and how to preserve,” Mitchell said, explaining that with the kitchen the county has provided the tools to combat food shortages and hunger.
“I know it’s a lot. It may be a big dream, but I think it’s definitely possible, and with the Mon County Center we definitely have the space, we definitely have the people and we can see the vision happening there,” Mitchell said.
Along with the community kitchen, the Mon County Center is home to Monongalia County Extension Services and West Virginia Department of Agriculture offices. Soon, it will also be the base of operations for the Monongalia County Department of Parks and Recreation, under the direction of JR Petsko.
“We have a lot of different things going on in the parks right now,” Petsko said.
The centerpiece of county park projects will be officially unveiled in June, when a half-million dollar overhaul of the nearly 70-year-old Camp Muffly Pool is unveiled.
Projects to remodel the camps bunk houses and restroom facilities are also in the works.
In fact, restroom upgrades are coming to all three county parks.
Petsko said the dining hall restroom at Chestnut Ridge Park and all seven of the parks outhouses will be renovated.
“I always feel like the facilities, when you go to a park, that’s one of the first things you notice if you want to come back, and the way they are right now, I wouldn’t want to come back,” Petsko said. “So we really want to put a lot of emphasis on that.”
He went on to explain that all 40 of the Chestnut Ridge camp sites and tent pads will be updated over the next two years.
The centerpiece of Chestnut Ridge projects is the ongoing work to turn the park’s sledding hill into a focus of wintertime recreation.
In February, the commission awarded a $199,999 contract to Anderson Excavating to regrade the hill and install a tow rope system that will haul tubers back to the top.
As for Mason-Dixon Historical Park, Petsko said there will be a continued focus on improving the park’s lower parking area as well as the placement of benches along the park’s 5.5 miles of hiking trails.
Lastly, the existing Dunkard Pavilion will be torn down and replaced, including an ADA-compliant sidewalk to the parking and restroom facilities.
Lastly, Petsko noted the Mason-Dixon and Chestnut Ridge parks will play host the upcoming summer concert series, which kicks off June 11 with Ruby-Mountain Soul at Chestnut Ridge.
Overall, Commissioner Sean Sikora said, accessibility has become a focus of the county’s park system, which has gone from somewhat of an afterthought – a line item on the commission’s ledger – to its own department under the leadership of Petsko, Mitchell and the county park superintendents.
To that end, the commission approved for the first time individual budgets for the various facilities, including $522,034 for Chestnut Ridge; $394,580 for the Mon County Center; $380,627 for Camp Muffly and $207,729 for Mason-Dixon.
“We’ve been managing these entities, but this is more of a formalization process to have formal budgets and empower the directors and superintendents to better manage their facilities,” Sikora said. “We’ve been moving towards this for years, and now we’re finally at the point where we have these budgets set and these individuals responsible.”
