Recreation, library biggest losers in cuts

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM--Early on, in developing a "worse-case scenario" for cuts in the city's budgets for 2003 and 2004, it was apparent that the two big losers would be the Park and Recreation Department and the Public Library.

As City Manager Brian Gramentz explained it, the city had to look to preserving essential services, like fire and police, at the expense of less essential services like Park and Recreation and the Library.

To ease the hit that would be taken by those departments, the City Council elected to dip into city reserves to ease the bite.

With the city's $12,392,525 budget adopted for 2004, it's now assured that, with the actual cuts in place, the difference in Park and Recreation will be the focus while the Library's focus will be essentially unchanged.

In Park and Recreation, in order to manage available resources, the focus will be on facility use and operation for the kids, and the outdoor programs are almost entirely cut, Director Dave Bechtold said.

With the outdoor programs for the most part cut, "that left the money available to leave some pre-school programming, and that was the outdoor pools," Bechtold explained.

In presenting his case to the council, Bechtold argued that "we're going to have some building expense, no matter if the pool is open or not. We have to do some cleaning and maintaining."

So, almost all, about 90 percent of the outdoor programs have been cut, and the department's programmer, Leslie Schipper, has been reassigned to help keep the buildings on line, Bechtold said.

"Leisure services and athletic services are being cut, and she's focusing on helping me keep the buildings going and then selling them at the same time. We're probably going to have the T-ball, Little League and soccer -- there's about a seven-week or six-week program -- but like flag football is being cancelled. The other outdoor programs are cancelled," Bechtold explained.

"She's in charge of the leisure services program, enrichment classes and stuff (which) have all been cut. Well, our operation of them has been cut, as far as our department goes."

Library Director Carolyn Baird is thankful that the council chose to dip into reserves to ease the cuts.

"We're able to maintain our part-time staff, as well as the full-time, but our budget for buying books has been cut in half. We will be able to keep the library open every day but Sunday," Baird said.

Library patrons have stepped forward, as well, she said.

"We've been able to restore some of the magazine subscriptions that we would have had to cut because of donations from them. We're thankful for that, too."