Eyebrows were raised when Augusta Parks and Recreation Director Maurice McDowell suggested the city should no longer maintain Pendleton King Park since, according to him, the city has to pay nearly $250,000 a year to manage the 64-acre park. However, city records dispute the McDowell’s claim.
McDowell’s figure is off by about $75,000, and the real budget is a fraction of the overall Parks and Recreation budget.
According to the FY 2022 budget, $174,290 is allocated for maintenance at Pendleton King Park.
The biggest expense by far is payroll. The city has budgeted for one full-time groundskeeper at an annual salary of $57,350, which is roughly $20,000 more than the average pay for an Augusta city groundskeeper, according to Salary.com.
However, the groundskeeper at the park has been with the city for decades and is nearing retirement age.
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The city also employs two part-time groundskeepers at a combined salary of $34,410 plus $6,000 for overtime, and the part-time jobs come with full benefits. Once the salaries, taxes and benefits are tallied, the city pays $121,000 a year total for employment at the park.
While that compensation may still seem a bit inflated, the employees mainly work at Pendleton King Park, but they are also routinely sent to other parks in the area for maintenance work.
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According to Pendleton King Park Foundation Trustee Diane Sprague, the groundskeepers do an excellent job of maintaining all 64 acres, even though they are sometimes called off the grounds to work at other recreation areas.
“The park has never looked so good; they are very committed to keeping the park looking spotless,” Sprague said.
The budget allocates $15,810 a year to pay the power bill at the park. Such an annual power bill might cause the average homeowner to faint, but there is a practical reason why the bill is so high.
The park uses a state-of-the-art industrial-sized pumping system at Lake Elizabeth which pumps water from the lake into the wetland area. The water moves through the wetlands and then is filtered and returned to the lake via the waterfall.
The water filtration system not only keeps the lake from being choked with algae, it benefits the wetlands ecosystem by not allowing the water to remain stagnant. While the park is designed for human recreation, it is also a wild bird sanctuary.
Pendleton King Park is unique in that unlike Riverwalk and the roughly 60 other parks and recreation venues, it is privately-owned and governed by the Pendleton King Park Foundation.
According to Rob Dennis, chairman of the Pendleton King Park Foundation, the foundation and its stakeholders are constantly raising money and have just recently spent more than $50,000 in private money and grants for badly-needed projects. Dennis says quite a bit of that money went to fix maintenance issues caused by the city’s neglect over the past years.
“Our stakeholders have paid $30,000 for new ADA compliant sidewalks, $10,000 to replace a pump at Lake Elizabeth and $9,000 for the lower wetlands overlook, and this was all deferred maintenance that should have been done by the city,” Dennis said.
Other needed repairs, such as the bridge behind the Franke Pavilion have been left in limbo, with McDowell and his office alternately citing lack of funds or “safety issues.”
“It’s already a safety issue and it needs to be fixed,” Dennis said.
However, the Trustees and anyone else not scouring through the budget records might not know that McDowell allocated $13,070 in American Rescue Plan supplemental funding for Pendleton King Park, meaning that particular bridge could have been replaced long ago.
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The city is currently negotiating with the foundation for a new maintenance agreement to replace the former 50-year contract that has since lapsed, and the trustees are optimistic the outcome will be in the community’s best interest.
“The city recently did a traffic survey, and we were all stunned at the results. We knew the park and especially the Bark Park is very popular, but the numbers of cars coming in and out each day show it is really the most popular park in Augusta,” Sprague said.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
