Cleaning schedule urged for Oahu city parks

A resolution that would ask the city Department of Parks and Recreation to create and publicly publish a schedule for park maintenance advanced out of the Parks and Community Services Committee and will be sent to the full City Council for a vote.

The resolution was introduced by Councilman Augie Tulba, who represents Ewa Beach. Tulba is also chairman of the Parks and Community Services Committee.

“I heard a lot in my community about grass cutting,” he said at the committee meeting Thursday.

“If we had a schedule up, it might help with not only transparency, but even possibly having more people participate in recommitting to our parks and helping.”

Tulba asked Department of Parks and Recreation Director Laura Thielen whether there was a maintenance schedule.

“I’m not clear what you mean by maintenance schedule,” she said in response. However, she said there are mowing crews that mow the parks’ District 1 and District 2 weekly and District 3 and District 4 about every two weeks.

The reason that park Districts 3 and 4 are mowed only every two weeks is because the districts are so large. District 3 runs from Pearl City down the entire Leeward Coast and has over 100 parks. District 4 runs from Makapuu around the island to Kaena Point.

“Those two districts have a real hard time in meeting the maintenance needs just in addition to all the parks they have, and all the people that are loving those areas to death, they have huge distances to travel,” Thielen said.

The parks department is trying to divide District 3 into two districts and add an additional grounds manager and crew to help oversee that area.

A June 2020 Department of Parks and Recreation audit, conducted by the Honolulu city auditor, Troy Shimasaki, criticized the deficient maintenance of Oahu parks.

The audit found that the department did not formally track or report its maintenance efforts. Instead, the efforts were “reactive,” which led to maintenance staff having to play catch-up with priority requests. It also had no specified benchmarks or qualitative standards for park maintenance and instead relied on photographs to achieve desired park conditions. It recommended that the department establish policies and procedures to track daily park maintenance efforts, quantify park standards and bring the ground maintenance staff rate up to 90%.

Thielen told Council members that the goal is to have a maintenance manual by the end of 2021 and then go on to train staff on the new guidelines. However, staffing likely will be an issue.

“As we start to set these maintenance goals and aspirations, we’re going to be short of personnel to achieve those desired goals,” she said.

“There’s probably a poor, a fair and a good standard that we can meet, and depending upon our staffing levels … (for) some of our regions, it’s just much harder for us to be able to retain staff in those areas.”

Long drives and lower populations of people who live in certain areas were the reasons she listed for why certain areas are difficult to staff.

As of late March the department had about 137 vacant positions and 1,187 full-time employees.

Certain parks have staff at the park, while others are unstaffed and thus are able to be serviced only periodically. However, Thielen denied that the department prioritizes some parks over others.

“By appearance, it may appear that these other parks have less attention because they don’t have people at them 100% of the time,” she said.

“But in some cases the staff that are located at a park may be the recreational staff that are working there, and the maintenance staff are still driving around to multiple parks.”

The department did not immediately respond to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser with information about what determined which parks are staffed and which are not. The department also did not explain how it determines where to send maintenance staff.

The parks department does not have its own dedicated hotline, but responds to requests submitted through the city’s 311 program, which includes an app that people can download on their smartphones.

“People can take a picture of something, it’ll have the GPS of the location, they send it on in and the Department of Customer Services routes it to the appropriate entity,” Thielen said.

Another way the parks department hears about maintenance issues is through City Council members’ offices when constituents submit requests.

The department also did not immediately respond to the Star-Advertiser’s questions about the existence of other maintenance schedules for issues other than mowing, such as graffiti, fallen tree limbs or damaged property.

The city does have an adopt-a-park program at bit.ly/3gHP9bl where volunteers can organize efforts to improve parks by working with maintenance staff to keep up with the demand in the recreation areas. People who are interested in the program can call 768-3034.

The full Council is expected to vote on the measure to establish and publish a park maintenance schedule. The next full Council meeting is July 7.