Parks and Rec budget: Hard, reasonable choices

This time it came down to the math.

The budgeting process for the Columbus Parks and Recreation Department, as with every other department, should always come down to the math, balanced out by common sense and the greater civic interest. It looks as though this year it will.

That hasn’t always been the case. The Parks and Rec budget, specifically the budgeting process for the Columbus Aquatic Center (more on that in a moment), has gotten bogged down in other matters, including purely political distractions, in which the math got lost or simply ignored. |

This year, thanks (if that’s the right word) to a city government-wide fiscal belt tightening, the math won. As reported by staff writer Alva James-Johnson, some Columbus councilors expressed tentative support for after-school program fee increases they opposed last year.

The decency factor in councilors’ resistance to those increases has to be given its due. Theirs was a genuine concern for people who most depend on those programs, and can least afford to pay more to sustain them. That’s a humanitarian, not a political, concern.

“I just want reassurance,” Councilor Skip Henderson, chair of the budget committee, said at a Tuesday budget meeting, “that we are still doing what we can to help a sector of the community that can’t otherwise find child care.”

But as Parks and Recreation Director Holli Browder told councilors Tuesday, the department is still operating at a deficit. The weekly fees, determined by a scale based on household income and family size, range from $21 to $56 for the first child in a family, and fall with each additional child; those fees would increase by $6 a week under Mayor Teresa Tomlinson’s proposed budget. Browder told council those fees, even with the increase, compare favorably with other after-school programs around the city.

The most absurd Parks and Rec budget squabbles of the past, of course, were those involving the Aquatic Center. Council got mired in have-it-both-ways, lines-in-the-dirt nonsense about not cutting back on the center’s operating hours, but also not spending any more than had been budgeted for what some sad-sack (and subsequently sacked) independent contractor had bid to run it for.

There was also a very legitimate concern that the proposed, and ultimately rejected, fee increases in after-school programs were for funding the swim center, at the expense of families who rarely if ever used it.

We opined, somewhere in there, that we would welcome an opportunity to write about something involving the Aquatic Center other than mismanagement and circular arguments.

That time, happily, seems to have come. The proposed budget calls for increased operating hours for the center – at no additional cost to the city or to pool users. Bravo.

Browder told council that the Parks and Rec Department had worked with the Aquatic Commission to add nine hours a week to the pool’s public availability. Henderson noted that the budget had always been about money; operating time is a management matter, and “the fact that you’ve been able to work that budget into expanding the hours is awesome.”

Agreed.

Closed door

Sometimes political scandals come on a grand scale, like Watergate, and sometimes they’re just plain old scuzzy thievery.

One Door for Education was a Virginia-based “charity” that amassed more than $800,000 over four years, ostensibly to fund scholarships for poor students.

It apparently gave out one — for $1,200.

A far bigger chunk of the money that flowed through One Door went into the hands of former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, a Florida Democrat who had represented the Jacksonville district since 1993.

Brown was convicted Thursday on 18 counts of fraud for taking hundreds of thousands in One Door funds, lying on taxes and falsifying congressional financial disclosure reports.

Brown pleaded not guilty, but testimony from her former chief of staff and the One Door president, both of whom had entered guilty pleas after federal indictments, did not go well for the ex-congresswoman. (Voters had already rendered their verdict last fall.)

Brown now awaits sentencing, and it’s possible, if unlikely, that there is another “one door” in her future. It makes a distinctive metallic sound when it closes.

This story was originally published May 13, 2017 at 4:02 PM with the headline "Parks and Rec budget: Hard, reasonable choices."