Charter change is going to voters
September 30, 2010 – Times-Picayune – More than 60 years ago, Time magazine did a feature story on the New Orleans Recreation Department. It didn’t focus on the lack of programming or decrepit facilities, the unstable leadership or the corrupt influence of politics.
No, that bygone Time magazine story highlighted a recreation department that was the best in the nation.
Recently at Oak Park Baptist Church in Algiers, City Councilmembers Arnie Fielkow, Jackie Clarkson and Kristen Palmer, along with other community leaders, discussed the new reforms up for a Saturday vote that aim to return NORD to the lofty status it once enjoyed.
“The No. 1 thing that you’re voting on is a change to the City Charter that creates a true public-private partnership that will be administering recreation for the city,” Fielkow told the audience at the event, which was hosted by Palmer.
The current system, relying on just a city department to administer recreation, “just doesn’t work,” Fielkow said. “It makes that department subject to all the politics and all of the management that goes on in City Hall. Every time you have a new mayor, a new City Council, any changes of leadership, you end up with changes of leadership in recreation.”
In the past 30 years, NORD has had 30 different directors, Fielkow said. Four different people have helmed the department in the past 18 months.
“If you have some experience in business and nonprofits, you know that if you don’t have stability, you’re not going anywhere,” Fielkow said.
Central to the reforms is the creation, by order of the City Council, of a 13-member commission that will oversee recreation in New Orleans.
That commission, comprised of both public and private sector individuals, will include the mayor, the city’s chief administrative officer, the deputy mayor of operations, the head of the City Planning Commission, the chair for the City Council Youth and Recreation Committee, the superintendents of the Orleans Parish School Board and the Recovery School District, a New Orleans Recreation Development Foundation representative, and five mayoral appointees representing each of the five council districts. The appointees would include grassroots representation, such as parents, coaches and booster club representatives.
“We didn’t just wake up one day and make this up,” Fielkow said. “This commission structure is the best practice. It is working in all of the award-winning cities.”
The current system is also flawed in that while NORD handles recreational programming, the Department of Parks and Parkways handles maintenance, Fielkow said.
“So if you have a baseball game at a NORD facility at 5 o’clock, the kids are … at the mercy of Parks and Parkways to make sure that the grass has been cut. That system is clearly not in the best interest of anyone, and it’s not a best practice around the country anymore.”
The NORD reforms will bring programming and maintenance under one umbrella, Fielkow said.
And perhaps most glaringly, NORD is, and has been, woefully underfunded — especially when compared with other cities around the country. The current NORD budget is $4.5 million. At its height during the 1990s, that budget reached about $9.5 million.
In contrast, Baton Rouge’s current recreation budget is about $40 million.
Where private money used to come from local businesses, those corporations have largely “given up” trying to work with a broken department, Fielkow said.
“Our coaches should be focusing on coaching and building those wonderful relationships with our children, not out there schlepping to try to find uniforms for our kids,” Palmer said, decrying the current lack of funding.
The new measures call for the creation of a separate board aside from the commission whose sole mission is to raise private dollars to supplement the public dollars that will come in.
“This is not privatization of NORD or recreation,” Fielkow said. “There are some folks in the community who want to keep throwing that out there. There’s nothing private about this effort. This is a true public-private partnership.”
Every meeting of the new commission will be open to the public, he said, every document is open and the hope is to hold commission meetings in the council chambers so that they can be televised.
“This is how it was supposed to work,” said Clarkson, whose father was the force behind the creation of NORD decades ago. “When NORD was founded, it was a public-private partnership.
“When my father was executive director, all he had to do was program NORD. And that’s why it was so good. He didn’t have to worry about the politics, and he didn’t have to worry about the private dollars.”
Today, a commission with a governing structure separate from the city and its politics is necessary to restart the flow of private money coming in, Clarkson said.
What sets these reforms apart from past efforts, she added, was that these changes will be written into the City Charter.
“Government by the people, that’s what you want,” Clarkson said. “If it goes in with your vote, it can only come out with your vote.”
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Brian Friedman is a contributor to The Times-Picayune.
