The Crookston Park Board met on Monday night and discussed the reserved parking spots at the Crookston Sports Center. Parks and Recreation Director Scott Riopelle suggested the park board consider implementing a policy that limits spots to one per household unless all six reserved spaces aren’t sold. They also considered the price with Mike LaFrance suggesting an increase to $225 and Becky Kofoed suggesting an increase to $300. Garrett Borowicz also said he wasn’t a fan of the spaces.
The board voted to limit the spaces to one per household and settled on a fee increase to $250. “We have six reserved parking spots out there and now coming forward for the next season it will be one per household allowed,” said Riopelle. “That’s because we’re getting enough interest from people, we want to make sure everybody has a chance for this. A motion was made and seconded so it was approved that we would go to $250 per stall and only one per family at this point. If we do not get enough people to come forward, then the other people would be able to submit for another one. But I think we do have enough as in the past we’ve had to do a drawing. But we want to make sure that everybody has the chance to get one if they are willing too.”
Jody Dragseth spoke to the Park Board about concerns of cleanliness in the Sports Center asking who is in charge of cleaning? Who checks what is done? And is there a checklist? Among the issues Dragseth had was spills, scuffs, and dirty poles near the concession stand with food on them. Riopelle said there are checklists in place but unfortunately the staffing level hasn’t yet ramped up for the winter, seasonal employees should start next week, and that the regular staff’s focus has been on making ice over the past two weeks. Riopelle and Dragseth discussed meeting Tuesday so Dragseth could show Riopelle the areas she is concerned about. “We’ll discuss that later,” said Riopelle. “I’ll discuss that with her and she where she sees some need for us to do some cleaning. It was explained that currently, the focus has not been on that stuff. But yes, we want to keep that clean and we’ll meet with her, look at the place, see what here concerns are, and then address them.”
Dragseth said her son came up with an idea that the hockey team could do some cleaning to earn money for the program, but City of Crookston Finance Director Angel Weasner said the city couldn’t pay the team. Borowicz also said that nearly 1,000 people took in the Hoops on Halloween at the Sports Center last Sunday and suggested the arena get additional folding chairs because many of the current chairs are older wooden ones that are bulky and hard to move.
The Crookston Rotary Club asked about adopting the Main Street Courtyard (Mayor’s Courtyard) and renaming it Rotary Park. Riopelle said that in looking through the City’s documentation its official name is Main Street Courtyard and that he currently wasn’t in favor of promoting a name change because the community has had other service groups that have invested heavily in certain parks around the community. There has however been an Adopt-A-Park program in place with the City of Crookston, although it hasn’t been used recently explained Riopelle. “The Rotary had done some work this past year on the Mainstreet Courtyard which is located on the corner of Robert Street and Main Street downtown,” said Riopelle. “They would like to adopt that park. They put some benches, did some water fixtures in the park this season and would like to maybe add to it. And it was approved that they could adopt that park and care for it. We do have other parks available for different groups of people that are interested if they want to come forward and adopt a park. Maybe not to the scale of this group is doing it but what we do currently with the Adopt-A-Park program is people come through twice a year for a spring and fall cleanup, stuff like that. It’s not really large scale with having to buy new fixtures or features for the park but we always welcome any of those types of things people would like to add as well.”
The final item on the agenda was the Northwest Regional Event Center Task Force meeting that will be Wednesday, November 20 at 7:00 p.m. in Bede Ballroom at the University of Minnesota Crookston. The task force is being created as a result of the Parks and Recreation brainstorming session last month where the most common theme was a need for a multi-use facility to meet the needs of the community and organizations. The discussion was on the scope of Wednesday’s meeting and Riopelle said the plan is to keep the scope broad in the early stages. “The plan Wednesday night is to try to get all of the different user groups in the community together at UMC in Bede Ballroom,” said Riopelle. “We’re looking at seeing what we can do to brainstorm something with a football/soccer field with turf, some stands, and then a building attached with maybe some court space, things like that. Andrea has sent [an invite] out to different user groups in the community. So, we’re hoping that at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday evening we can get some people out a Bede Ballroom and come up with some ideas for what they’d like to see in this facility going forward. Then we’ll determine later where it will be built and how we’re going to go about getting the money to do it.”
