A LEGACY OF INFLUENCE
After a year of turmoil that included beating cancer, Rick Anthony, who is the county’s longest-serving department head, is going home to California
Rick Anthony has overseen the Department of Recreation and Parks for more than a decade, but his journey with Anne Arundel County government started in 1993 when he was a corrections officer at the Jennifer Road Detention Center. When he tells people how much he enjoyed this part of his career, sometimes they cock their head to the side, wondering how a now 55-year-old mild-mannered preacher from the West Coast could have thrived working in the county jail. He is also an Air Force veteran, a certified arborist and a licensed Maryland tree expert. While attending junior college in California, he spent summers harvesting watermelon, getting paid by the pound.
“When things like that happen to you, it changes your perspective and makes you realize just, you know, how precious life is.”
Rick Anthony
At the end of April, the father of four will leave his post as the county’s longest-serving department head and move back to his native Bakersfield, California, to be closer to his parents, his siblings and his only daughter. He will take over as city director of recreation and parks.
The legacy he leaves is marked by the people he influenced along the way, he said.
“There’s a lot more to it than a lot of people think, you know, and I laugh because I remember somebody saying ‘Hey, throwing basketballs and painting barbeque grills, how hard can that be?’ ” Anthony said. “But then you start talking about agricultural preservation. We have stewardship of environmental resources, and there’s just so much more. It’s such a diverse, complex agency.”
He was young in 1993, just 28-years-old when he was working at the detention center as a house arrest coordinator and pretrial investigator. He began taking weekend shifts with a colleague who had a tree-trimming business. He was a natural and eventually opened his own business. As it blossomed, he shifted to working nights at the detention center so he could dedicate more time to his business.
In 2003, Anthony pivoted to arbor work and poured himself into it full time until the economy crashed in 2008.
All the while, he coached youth football — the Edgewater Blue Devils — and worked to merge three local youth sports organizations.
He said it didn’t make sense for the competing organizations to offer sports to students who go to the same schools and are part of one community.
Forming South River Youth Athletics, the resulting league, in 2008 is among the accomplishments Anthony said makes him most proud.
He was tapped by former County Executive John Leopold to serve in the Office of Constituent Services and Community Engagement, where he handled evening town halls and other efforts. When Leopold asked him to serve as the interim director of Recreation and Parks after a departure in 2010, his first instinct was to say no.
But managing the tree business was hard on his family, so he decided to sell and take the job in Recreation and Parks. A few months later, he was appointed the permanent director.
He served under four other county executives after Leopold left office, leaders of both political parties.
“If you have any sense, you keep the good people,” said Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman, who reappointed Anthony when he was elected in 2018. “Half the department heads, I don’t know what political party they’re from, and I don’t care. Their jobs aren’t political.”
When Anthony started in the role in 2010 he sensed strife and unease in the department. About a year and a half later, Leopold would resign after being found to have abused the office and had an affair with a Recreation and Parks employee.
Anthony decided to start addressing morale by listening to his employees and the community.
“I knew there was no magic pill or solution to fix the issues there, but people began to trust me, people began to buy-in. They began to realize that it was not, for me, something that I wanted to elevate myself — It wasn’t looking for any political career,” Anthony said. “I truly want the department to be great and I wanted the people to be great.”
Jason Clarke, president of the Anne Arundel Youth Football Association and a friend of more than 15 years, said he thinks Anthony’s experience with youth sports in the community informed his leadership. He also said Anthony’s identity as a Black man played an important role too.
“Within our African American community in Anne Arundel County, when you find people like that, it speaks a lot because there are not that many of us in those positions of influence, especially among the youth,” Clarke said. “He was exactly what we needed in that time.”
Anthony’s employees sang the same praises.
David Smalley, the county recreation administrator, said that in a job with public-facing services, it can be easy to get caught up in individual complaints and frustrations.
But Smalley said Anthony is always able to keep the work in perspective
“Rick’s always had a good grasp… Never loses sight of the bigger picture of what we’re trying to accomplish, whether we’re trying to improve parks, whether we’re trying to improve our childcare situation or our athletics or our pools,” Smalley said. “But he still keeps his hand on the overall mission and the vision he had.”
Jessica Leys, who will succeed Anthony as the director, said he facilitated a culture change in the department by instituting an “open door policy” and encouraging his staff to come in for informal chats. Sometimes, Leys said, his administrative assistant would have to come in and remind him he had meetings because chats with employees went on so long.
Last year, when the coronavirus pandemic hit and life turned upside down for Anne Arundel County, Anthony’s department was ready.
They waived park fees for regional parks and instead requested nonperishable food donations from those who had the capacity to give. They pivoted their childcare staff to care for the children of essential workers and reassigned staff to other departments when necessary.
While most other outlets for public life were shuttered for months, county parks became a refuge for residents. Attendance jumped nearly 30% in March alone.
All the while, Anthony was confronting his own life-altering event. He’d been diagnosed with throat cancer, and his chemotherapy was scheduled to begin in March 2020.
His mother had planned to fly out from California to help out during his treatment, but COVID canceled her trip.
“When things like that happen to you, it changes your perspective and makes you realize just, you know, how precious life is,” Anthony said.
His father fell ill with the virus and recovered, but he watched many of his friends and colleagues lose their parents over the last year — to COVID and other causes— and said watching them experience that pain made him want to spend as much time as possible with his family.
He’s now cancer-free and vaccinated against COVID. He is looking forward to spending time with his family when he moves to California.
But leaving Anne Arundel County was the hardest decision he’s made in his life, Anthony said. He plans to tour every park and property he oversaw, but mostly he will miss the people.