At the Town Charter Committee meeting Tuesday night, the committee held a conversation with representatives of the Parks and Recreation Department to inquire about its operational management.
Chair Amy Drinker said the board decided to invite different departments, represented by both department heads and committees or commissions, to meet with the board to ask them “a basic set of questions.”
Representing the Parks and Recreation Department were Commission members Karin Ernst, Shelly Bedrossian, Linda Rice Collins, and Rossana Ferrante.
The first question was whether the current structure of the department allows for effective delivery of services to the community.
The resounding answer from the four was yes. Rice Collins said she believes the current structure of the department is good.
“There’s a lot of collaboration that goes on between the recreation side and the park side, they do a lot,” Rice Collins said. “The park side does a lot to prep for our recreation programming. So they go hand in hand, and they really do work well together.”
Another question that was presented by the board was, if the commission’s members would suggest any restructuring within the department.
“I would, absolutely,” Bedrossian said.
She said she would advise this because although she has only been on the commission for more than a year, the business that she and her husband own has shown her “what works right, what doesn’t work right, how we compare.”
“I don’t know obviously all the other committees in town as intimately as I know ours, but I do see in a lot of other cases that there’s a lot of overlap and a lot of efficiencies could be brought together for economies of scale, sharing employees during peak times, and really, more than anything, increasing the accountability,” Bedrossian said.
Rice Collins echoed Bedrossian’s point, adding that in the future, department heads could possibly work together to help each other with projects.