City panel recommends changes for park safety
Parks and Recreation Commission forwards series of action steps
City has forged a list of recommended policy changes to improve safety conditions for park employees.
SANTA CRUZ >> A city commission has forged a list of recommended policy changes designed to improve safety conditions for park and recreation employees.
At the culmination of about seven months’ work by the panel’s subcommittee, the Parks and Recreation Commission unanimously voted Monday afternoon to forward a series of actionable steps spanning safety training and increased legal clarity to partnering with nonprofits and revising the Ranger Program to the Santa Cruz City Council.
The employee safety review stemmed originally from an administrative decision in the Parks and Recreation Department to close the public bathrooms last year at the Louden Nelson Community Center for those not enrolled in the facility’s on-site programs. After reviewing the decision at the request of the Santa Cruz City Council, the commission endorsed the staff decision.
Later, the commission went one step further, seeking to investigate similar employee safety concerns “straight across all the parks,” said subcommittee member and commission Vice Chairwoman Jane Mio. The committee conducted interviews with law enforcement and department staff and reviewed a one-month internal “snapshot” of staff incidents to shape their recommendations.
“It’s the same issues that staff has to work on their own on situations that are totally not part of their work schedule and they’re left to deal with it themselves and it’s just not appropriate,” Mio said Monday.
Roughly, the recommendations including creating an avenue for employees to seek support in handling serious problem behavior, having consistent police, ranger and security patrols in public spaces, receiving additional employee training on low-level conflict resolution with the public and establishing worker uniforms for better identification. The report also suggests creating partnerships with county services and nonprofit agencies to reduce exposure to discarded syringes and offer mental
health and other homeless services outreach.
Commission Chairman J.M. Brown launched Monday’s discussion by clarifying that the agenda item was not specific to homelessness, though the subcommittee highlights the connection between behavior issues that are often associated with homelessness. Brown later underscored that the commission has narrow pa
rameters, and was “really trying to isolate this discussion around behaviors and that the housing status of the people causing the issue was not part of our evaluation, it was really just about behaviors.”
The commission also voted to ask city leadership to clear up regulatory and operational uncertainty around the city’s no-camping ordinance and interpretation of related court decisions, because “inconsistencies are driving the lack of enforcement against behaviors that threaten staff and
system users, as well as leading to facility damage and environmental degradation in open spaces and natural habitat areas,” according to the subcommittee report.
Addressing “the elephant in the room,” Brown said one glaring issue related to the discussion was the recent years’ reassignment of all the city’s former park rangers to Santa Cruz Police Department oversight in two stages. The commission, he said, was not asked to make a formal finding on the change.
“Parks and Recreation
would benefit from a revised Ranger Program that could be the first line-of-defense for parks safety and provide a pro-active approach to stewarding improved environmental conditions and interpretation of parks’ assets,” the subcommittee report reads. With upcoming citywide budget-cutting efforts underway, several commissioners wondered what, if any, resources the city would have to implement the recommended actions.