LITTLE ROCK — With about 60 parks covering more than 6,100 acres, the Little Rock Parks and Recreation Department has its hands full keeping up with maintenance requests for trees and other natural features as well as many man-made amenities such as playgrounds.
A new program started this month is expected to lend some willing, helpful hands to assist Little Rock in reaching its goal of becoming a “city in a park.”
The city is now looking for people for its first class of volunteer park rangers. Participants must be willing to chip in four to six hours a week to work on maintenance projects, special events, medical emergencies and informational tours in some of the city’s parks.
Similar programs are popular in cities across the country with hundreds of volunteer park programs in places like Prescott, Ariz., Somerset County, N.J., and Sedona, Calif. The programs rely on young and old volunteers who have varying interests and skills to help keep the parks clean and the visitors informed.
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola proposed starting a volunteer parks program in his State of the City address last year, but he said Thursday that he had been considering the idea long before he gave that speech.
“I thought I was finding a creative solution, but it turns out other communities had tried this in the past and I didn’t know about it at the time,” Stodola said.
“I have long been advocating that we needed to create a volunteer park ranger program that would help give eyes and ears to our city staff,” he said. “Having those eyes and ears is going to be very, very helpful to maintaining our park program.” Participants “will be trained in CPR and other areas. And if we see [signs] of problems, we will have a better opportunity to take care of those issues, such as adding more patrols if needed.”
The Parks Department hired a coordinator to help get the program started and has taken a handful of applications for the first class.Administrators are hoping to train 15-20 volunteers. Once the applications are accepted and class participants are chosen, the volunteers will go through training that will include instruction in traffic control and the use of defibrillators, as well as park-area orientations.
The volunteers will be issued mandatory uniforms and will start working in a handful of the city’s parks, including MacArthur, Murray, Riverfront, Reservoir, War Memorial, Hindman, Morehart and Wakefield. The volunteers also will be required to obey Parks Department rules and staff policies.
Norm Berner, the parks program coordinator, previously served as the public affairs coordinator for the Meadowcliff Brookwood Neighborhood Association and has experience organizing volunteers.
He has been an advocate for the Keep Little Rock Beautiful litter- and debris cleanup initiative, and helped organize neighborhood association volunteers for a yearlong, six-phase revamp of the 200-acre Hindman Community Park.
That park “was a safe haven for criminal activity because it was so neglected and so obscure and so easy to hide in,” Berner said. “The [tree] canopy was so low, you couldn’t see very far across the park. The criminal element were left an easy target all night long.”
He and fellow neighborhood volunteers decided to roll up their sleeves and clean up that park after four teen-agers working there on a school litter-pickup project were attacked by other youths. He said two of the teens were beaten and ended up in the hospital, and all of them had their wallets, phones and cars stolen.
“That was a low point” at the park, he said. “We knew we had to do something to take it back.”
Over the course of about a year, 70 or so volunteers cleared low-hanging brush, natural debris and litter. They worked out a mowing schedule, formed patrols, started a disc golf course and created an environment where people could safely walk with their children.
“The more people who started using the park and feeling comfortable being there, the less criminals had cover and wanted to be there,” Berner said.
Soon the neighborhood association was sending people to help address problems at other parks. They lent out volunteers to do some tidying up before a recent 5-K charity run at MacArthur Park, for example.
Berner believes that some of the volunteers from Hindman Park’s revitalization will be interested in signing up for the park rangers class.
Stodola said that once the program gets rolling, he’s hoping to expand it to include trail guides for the city’s walking and biking paths. He also hopes to have some volunteers on bicycles to help direct bicycle traffic and ensure that cyclists and pedestrians are sharing the trails with one another.
“We’re working with our bicycle-friendly committee and [Bicycle Advocacy of Central Arkansas] to work out the responsibilities for some of the volunteer rangers and the opportunities to have them monitoring the trails,” Stodola said. “We’re really working on this to make it a balance between the interests the volunteers have, the commitment we need, and the benefit we want for the city.”
People interested in volunteering can send their applications to parkranger@littlerock.org or visit littlerockserves.org to obtain more details.
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 05/27/2012