The deputy director of operations for the Little Rock Parks and Recreation Department will serve as interim director after the department head's resignation last month.
The previous director, John Eckart, submitted his resignation in November. His last day in the office was Dec. 14.
Leland Couch has been named interim director, City Manager Bruce Moore said via email.
Asked if Couch was under consideration as a permanent replacement for Eckart, Moore wrote Thursday that "no decision has been made regarding a permanent replacement."
Couch took over Dec. 15, according to Moore.
Moore said late last year that the job of parks director would get filled sometime in the first quarter of 2022.
Eckart became the parks director in Little Rock in June 2017 after serving in the same capacity for the city of Benton.
After he provided notice of his resignation to Moore in November, Eckart told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he would begin working with a family business in Arkansas.
A decision on a permanent replacement will fall to Moore pursuant to a government-reorganization plan that Mayor Frank Scott Jr. put in place shortly after his January 2019 inauguration for a first term.
At that time, Scott announced that he would oversee the directors of six city departments: finance, fire, human resources, planning and development, police and public works.
Couch began in the deputy director role in October 2021 after a three-year stint as the parks design manager, according to his LinkedIn page. Before that, he served as a "park planner II" with the city of Little Rock for close to 12 years, his profile says.
He did not immediately return a voicemail Friday.
In his resignation letter to Moore dated Nov. 16, Eckart wrote, "I am confident that we have a solid team that will remain in place to continue moving the department forward."
As interim director, Couch will oversee a department made up of 102 full-time employees authorized in the city's general fund, according to the proposal document for the 2022 budget that city officials adopted last month.
In terms of full-time staffers accounted for in the general fund, the Parks and Recreation Department is Little Rock's third-largest, behind the police and fire departments.
As part of his "Rebuild the Rock" sales-tax initiative originally unveiled last spring, Scott had proposed significant upgrades for the city's parks and recreation offerings that would have taken place over the tax's 10-year lifespan.
But in a Sept. 14 referendum, voters rejected the 1 percentage-point increase to the city's sales-tax rate -- a separate local sales tax for capital improvements that was set to expire meant that the net increase would have been 0.625%.