City Council discusses opening Parks and Recreation activities and equipment

Posted

City Council discusses opening Parks and Recreation activities and equipment

By Shiloh Appel

During the Monday, May 18th meeting of the Redfield City Council, the council extensively discussed whether or not to open up parks and recreation activities and park equipment. The council also discussed to what extent the equipment and activities should be made available to the public. The topic of proper equipment sanitation was also brought up.

“The general consensus of the board was to hold off until July. We wouldn’t open anything before July 6th and we’d make that final determination the middle of June,” said Randy Maddox, who attended the Parks and Recreation board meeting prior to the city council meeting.

According to Mike Siebrecht, board members were generally against the idea of opening up the Redfield municipal pool.

“The overall paint and everything to get it fired up would be eight to ten thousand [dollars],” said Siebrecht. “If we wait until July to open that up, we are looking at just a shorter period. …Basically, what it boils down to, is we don’t want to push the Parks and Recreation too hard because we want our kids to go to school in the fall. We don’t want to have a whole relapse and then have no kids in school and be right where we were at two months ago. So, pretty much the general consensus was not to open up anything.”

“For baseball, they were going to do 3rd grade and up, and just practices. No games with anybody from out of town,” said Maddox. “With the pool, it was ‘how do you social distance and how do you disinfect that much area. Even if you went with 50 percent of the occupancy, kids don’t want to go swim with their family, they want to go swim with their buddies. That was kind of the thought there.”

As for the the rest of the facilities in the the parks, such as bathrooms, water fountains and playground equipment, the council discussed opening them to the public and disinfecting them often.

“They would mix up solution in a sprayer, like a two-gallon garden sprayer so they could spray down the facility. They could spray down the playground equipment as they went by, and if they worked it out right, they would come by every two hours and catch door knobs and wipe things down with hand-wipes,” said Maddox.

After much discussion, the council decided disinfecting equipment and bathrooms every two hours was not feasible. Instead, the agreement was to have everything cleaned in the morning and disinfected in the afternoon. The bathrooms and playground equipment were opened to the public immediately on Tuesday, May 19th.  A motion to  to tentatively open the Parks and Rec activities to the public on July 6th after a  final review on June 11th was made by Joe Morrissette and seconded by Frank Schwartz.

A current list of cancelled Parks and Recreation activities and activities that have not been cancelled can be found on the Redfield Parks and Recreation Facebook page.