Shelly Bedrossian, a board member of the Friends of the Council on Aging and treasurer and scheduler of Marblehead Youth Hockey for the past five years, wants to plan innovative ways to come up with funds, rather than rely on taxpayer dollars.
Bedrossian has retired from a career of executive leadership, during which she managed up to $20 million in revenue.
“I’m used to working on a lot of complicated projects,” she said at the League of Women Voters Candidates Night. “My responsibilities included going primarily to underperforming sectors of our organization and transforming them into streamlined operations that were very efficient, and so they could go from being very underperforming to top-performing offices.”
“I did this in a collaborative way by listening, identifying the needs, and really coaching members up to be the best that they could be to bring a lot to the organization,” she added.
As the treasurer and scheduler of Marblehead Youth Hockey Association, Bedrossian has implemented an automatic billing and payment system, bringing the league delinquencies from 30% to less than 2%.
Bedrossian sourced a new scheduling and scalable communication system, essential to managing the complicated sport with over 250 participants, 500 practices, 300 games, and 18 tournaments in 35 weeks.
If elected as a Recreation and Parks commissioner, Bedrossian plans on taking steps that don’t affect taxpayers’ dollars and agrees to continue what the board has implemented in the past years, including the use of organic practices.
“I do know that organic practices are much more expensive and there’s going to be some budgetary restraints on that,” Bedrossian said. “If you look at the operating budget last year it’s $840,000, and $671,000 of that was for full-time employees. So, there’s not a lot of money left over to do that. So that’s something to consider, but we should generally continue to go in that direction.”
Bedrossian wants to implement long-term planning and funding initiatives for the town, including the repurposing of Reynolds Field without relying on money.
“We have a lot of tax-relief for some seniors that volunteer for certain things in town, and I think that’d be a way to avoid prevailing wage, is perhaps, we have so many wonderful landscapers in town, that they could volunteer their time in exchange,” Bedrossian said.
“We have to ensure that the 2016 Lars Anderson million-dollar gift for a winter sport and skating facility is used as it was intended, and continue to work with that private equity firm to design, build, and manage a state-of-the-art multi-generational sports facility with no burden to our taxpayers,” she added.