The Crookston Park Board met on Tuesday evening and the only item on the agenda was the orientation presentation for new members. New park board members for 2020 are Brigette Burzette-DeLeon and David Hennings. Hennings will interview for the open Ward 5 seat on the City Council on Wednesday night.
Crookston Parks and Recreation Director Scott Riopelle said new members usually don’t know about all the parks or in some cases the facilities that the city has. adding it’s a good reminder for returning members as well. “We have a couple of new members and each year it’s just a good reminder to the returning members,” said Riopelle. “We go over what parks we have, what programs we have, what facilities we have. Especially, the newer people don’t know about all those sites as far as whether it’s the parks or facilities, then we go over the program we do. And as we’re talking, look for future reference as to what we can go forward with.”
Riopelle said there is one big project planned and that the board will continue to discuss a possible regional event center with a turf field in 2020. “The only big thing is we’re looking at is redoing the tennis courts at Highland Park which we were going to do last year, but it got too late for any of the vendors to come in to do the work,” said Riopelle. “We’re still looking at whether we’d do a turf field or something with that regional facility and go from there.”
Plans for spring and summer programming are underway and the Park and Rec funfinder should be released sometime in March. “Andrea (Prudhomme, Administrative Assistant) has been working on the spring/summer funfinder,” said Riopelle. “Most of that stuff usually comes out towards the end of March, maybe. So, it’s a little closer to the season unless we have some activities that are starting ahead of time, something in the spring. That will go out with flyers. They work on that throughout the winter, but we’re about a month out on that at this point.”
