MORGANTOWN — In June 2018, BOPARC leadership came before Morgantown City Council to deliver some hard truths about the city’s park system.
Executive Director Melissa Wiles and Assistant Director Marissa Travinski explained that BOPARC was overseeing a far-larger and more-diverse roster of facilities with fewer employees than when the organization was formed in 1981.
And while costs climbed year over year, funding for parks had remained stagnant.
This equation resulted in a seemingly insurmountable amount of deferred maintenance as much of BOPARC’s available cash routinely went into keeping the system’s best earners — a 60-year-old pool and a 40-year-old ice rink — open for business.
“It’s a tough thing,” Wiles said at the time, “But this is the reality of your park system.”
Without a dedicated revenue source, Wiles continued, BOPARC’s future would be more of the same — a decreasing number of employees trying to stretch a dwindling pool of money over aging, or just plain old, facilities.
A little over a year later, that revenue source was approved by Morgantown City Council in the form of a municipal sales tax that took effect in July 2020. BOPARC receives 25% of the sales tax revenue collected by the city.
In the current fiscal year, that’s expected to be at least $2.2 million to the city’s parks just in sales tax money. BOPARC’s entire operating budget in 2018 was $3.3 million.
The effects have been immediate.
Sales tax funds will back bonds used to finance a long-planned overhaul of the Morgantown Ice Arena at an estimated cost of $10.4 million to $11.5 million and a new Marilla Park Pool complex at $9 million to $11 million. Both projects are slated to begin in 2023.
Further, sales tax revenue received to this point — some $2.24 million — plus unbonded sales tax revenue going forward, is going toward much-needed updates like a system-wide playground replacement at a total expected to exceed $1 million.
In 2021, BOPARC spent about $263,000 on the new Krepps Park playground. So far in 2022, new playgrounds have gone in at the Wiles Hill Community Center, Suncrest Mini Park (Turtle Park) and the King Street Playground (Water Tower Park).
Next on the docket are playgrounds at Jack Roberts Park and the large Marilla Park playground, which will be replaced during construction of the new pool complex next door.
Travinski said all of BOPARC’s playgrounds were pushing 30 years old.
Morgantown mayor and BOPARC board member Jenny Selin said the community is taking notice.
“It’s just so refreshing to have the ability to do those things. It’s refreshing to have the means and will to make these improvements,” Selin said. “People are very complementary. By the time you get to the fifth and sixth playground, people start going ‘Oh, something is going on here.’”
Selin’s comments were echoed by many of her colleagues.
“I think we’re really showing the community what we can do now that we have a little bit of money and really showing that we are responsible stewards of that taxpayer money,” Morgantown deputy mayor and BOPARC President Danielle Trumble said. “Great job to everyone. I’m proud, as I’ve always been, but it’s really a great time to be a member of the BOPARC board right now.”
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