Everett to spruce up its parks

EVERETT – Living in Everett’s parks and public areas are stable shrubs, blissfully low-key bushes and lackadaisical leaves.

But lurking among the easygoing trees and flowers are plants that cannot be ignored, such as the high-maintenance hedges at Grand Avenue Park.

The hedges separate the manicured park from its stunning views and steep drop-off, but their required weekly trimming makes them the high-fashion models of city park plants.

In parks as in life, supermodels are OK – but with cuts in the Parks and Recreation Department in 2003, there’s a limit to how many high-maintenance divas can stay in city parks.

The Everett City Council this week voted to spend $1.3 million to upgrade several parks and public spaces, including making some areas easier to maintain.

“Some of our parks have been loved to death. We need some sprucing up. We use them so much, we need to put some money back into them,” council President Marian Krell said.

Each project will include a “sustainable maintenance” component as part of the department’s effort to simplify and decrease hours spent on things such as mowing and pruning.

“We’re recovering from (last year’s) downsizing and looking at how we can be more efficient,” parks director Susan Francisco said.

“Parks are such a vital part of our community, we don’t want to lose that. We’re not going to let them go to the point where they have to have a huge recovery effort later on.”

With fewer employees to tend the city’s 39 parks, the department is enacting a more standardized maintenance schedule. That means replacing the city’s more needy greenery with mellower plants, and areas of some parks may adopt the natural look, Francisco said.

Councilman Ron Gipson voted against spending the money.

“If we didn’t let all those folks go, we wouldn’t be spending $1.5 million,” Gipson said Friday.

He also worries that work on park renovations, including sidewalks, curbs and asphalt, won’t be able to be done by city employees.

“You don’t cut a department all the way down to the bones and then start outsourcing the work,” Gipson said. “A majority of that stuff could be done in-house if we had the personnel.”

Langus Riverfront Park in north Everett is the site of the largest project. There the city is spending $581,888 to replace the dilapidated rowing and boat launch docks with new ones made of durable, nonslip materials.

Also, the city will spend $436,432 on a complete overhaul of Lions Park on Cascade Drive in south Everett. The park will get new playground equipment, new paths, a new parking lot and irrigation updates.

The council voted to spend $150,000 on improving the aesthetics of Everett’s gateways to the north and south, as well as the landscape beds on Colby Avenue.

Though there always will be more hedges to be clipped than there are hands to clip them, investing in a sustainable maintenance program will save the city time and money in the long run, Francisco said.

Also, naturalizing some areas will free up more time to beautify others, particularly Everett’s most popular parks, said Hal Gausman, assistant director of parks and recreation.

“There’s just a lot of places that we want to make sure are weed-, litter- and graffiti-free, and that the community feels safe being in all the parks,” Gausman said.

“That’s the goal – that all of our parks are a place people want to go to spend time. We’ve got great staff, they just have so much to get to.”

Reporter Jennifer Warnick: 425-339-3429 or jwarnick@heraldnet.com.

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