Worsley’s worst-to-first department

Columbus Parks and Recreation Director James Worsley is headed for greener pastures, at least where “long green” is concerned. And Columbus’ loss will definitely be Chesterfield’s gain.

That’s Chesterfield, Va., a Richmond suburb of about 327,000, which has lured him away with what will amount to about a 40 percent raise.

The proverbial handwriting has been on the wall for a while when it came to the likelihood of Worlsey eventually moving on, and probably sooner rather than later. But in this case, the handwriting wasn’t even Worlsey’s own.

In giving this mostly undervalued city official his due, we need to remember the circumstances under which he came to town.

Six years ago, the Columbus Parks and Recreation Department had become a corrupt mess. Director Tony Adams was fired for insubordination, in retrospect a mild interpretation of his denials that he had contracted with Nike for a city-run youth basketball team.

The director and two others would face, and later plead guilty to, charges in connection with $200,000 from the Nike-sponsored team they supposedly didn’t have a contract with.

Enter James Worsley in March 2011, who by last year had transformed Parks and Rec from a city agency whose name had become synonymous with scandal into the highest ranked in the state: The Georgia Recreation and Parks Association picked Columbus to receive the 2015 Agency of the Year Award for cities with populations of 150,001 and above.

He couldn’t have known what a burr in the saddle the then-unfinished Columbus Aquatics Center would turn out to be. But he did know, and say, that it was going to cost more money than the city had budgeted to run it the way it was expected to be run.

After the city hired a private outfit to manage it on the cheap — and, as is usually the case, got what it paid for — Parks and Recreation was charged with running it on an interim basis. Several members of Columbus Council would make it clear that they expected Worsley to come up with ways — i.e., money — to keep the swim center open for a full schedule, even if that meant gutting other programs in his department. (As frustrating as it must be to get handed an impossible task, how much more so to be scapegoated for the fact that it’s impossible. The price of having been right can be high indeed if it’s exacted by the ones who were wrong.)

None of which Worsley cited as a factor in his imminent and “bittersweet” departure: “Anywhere you go, you’re going to have opportunities and rough patches that you have to handle.”

Instead, he lavished praise upon employees of “an accredited agency and a nationally award-winning department … I truly hope that each of you will continue to excel in your respective areas of the department.”

Mayor Teresa Tomlinson got close to the heart of what Worsley achieved in his short tenure here when she said he “was asked to spin gold from straw and he did.”

This story was originally published June 22, 2016 at 4:33 PM with the headline "Worsley’s worst-to-first department."