Public Works Committee - Regular Meeting

All right.

Go ahead. Okay, great. We're going to go ahead and call the meeting. We're running just a tad late. And it happens during summer break in Hendersonville because everybody's trying to get home early for the children and stuff. But we'll go ahead and call the meeting to order. We do have someone on Citizens' Comments. But what we'll do is we'll get to that in just a minute. But right now, I just need, yeah, since we do have a citizen comment, we'll need a motion to accept the agenda as is or additions or deletions at this time. So I need a motion.

Motion. Second. Okay.

All in favor signify by saying aye. All opposed, passage unanimously. We have the minutes of the May 26, 2026 meeting, and I need a motion.

Motion. Second.

And there's been a proper motion, a proper second. Any discussion? Hearing none. All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

All opposed? Passes unanimously. Now we're down to citizens' comments. And Mrs. Moore, she is from 119 Coldwater Drive, which is in Ward 4. Ms. Moore, thank you for coming to our committee tonight.

Thank you. I have been a citizen of Hendersonville for 30 years. I have lived at this address for the last five. And since 2021, my yard has slowly been destroyed, creating a liability for safety. concerned trees might fall, all as a direct result of a poorly inefficient design drainage system wherein my yard solely supports at least 50 houses in the bent tree subdivision above me. And over this period of time, neighbors have complained and It's a natural flow that the city got involved in that they worked up from the street to right before me to people that were having direct flooding into their houses. And at one point through the Naples common area woods above me, I would see this runoff. As the city got involved more, recognizing this is clearly an issue, time of year or so, they have opened up drains above me, and the yard literally looks like Niagara Falls. I've worked solely with Trace Burkett. I've been at the platitudes, and I've been on it way too long, and

I want my yard fixed okay um and so I just want to okay that's that's good enough we'll get to this um to discuss it um I was just trying to see where we could uh put it down I guess we'll do it as under other business so um I'll wait uh to give some comments about that and I think probably uh Alderwoman Dixon and Alderwoman Goodwin might have to add some things to it. But that is all that's on the citizens' comments for this evening. We have our first is ordinance and resolution. It's a resolution 2026-22, a resolution to adopt the 2026 City of Hendersonville's parks and rec system-wide master plan five-year update. I know all of them in the garden is not here, but I see that Andy, our public works director.

Oh, don't put that title on me, please.

Okay. What did I say? Public works. Oh, I did? Yeah. Well, I'm back with it. Well, you're an honorary member of public works. How's that sound? Sounds great.

And your first job is to solve her problem.

She missed her chance in 2018. There you go. And I was her alderman.

That's right.

Nope.

That's right. But we'll go ahead and discuss that now. And Andy, if you'd talk to us about that.

Sure. So we've been working on this plan for the past six to seven months. Okay. We've had meetings with, combined meetings with the Parks Board at BOMA, community surveys, talks with stakeholders. back and forth with staff. So what you have in your packet is a 100-page document that is a draft copy of the plan. What I just passed out to you and what's on the screen here is kind of a synopsis of the plan. I would call it a Cliff Notes version that touches on all the areas that are within the 100 pages. So I'll go through this, but if you have specific questions that are on a specific page within the 100-page document, we can talk about those too. Uh, the request, uh, before you in the resolution is to make a recommendation to Boma to adopt the master plan. Okay. Um, why do we have to do that? That is required. That's a required step from T deck and the office of outdoor recreation to have an adopted 5 year update of your master plan. If you choose to apply for certain grants that we. I've gotten in the past few years, this is our 5 year update. We did it. We did a 10 year plan 5 years ago and this is a 5 year update. Um, why is that important? 5 years ago, when we did our master plan pickleball was not even remotely up on the list of things to do. So, if you do that, if you do that now, and we hadn't addressed pickleball between now, and then you would have seen pickleball high on this list. So. There are things that come up over the course of time. I think what PDX purpose was, was to get people to start looking more frequently at the needs of their community. In terms of when you apply for a grant, they look to see if the funds you are asking for are within the scope of what the community says is important, what staff feels important, what BOMA and the Parks Board feels important. So a lot of these conclusions that you see are combinations, not necessarily all from one place. Here on page one, it talks about the engagement from the survey. You can see some of the higher requested things that were on there. We had over 1,500 people take the survey. I thought that was really good engagement from the community. I think I mentioned for those of you that were here in the SWAT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, I think I predicted accurately that swimming or splash pads would be high on the list of requests from the community. You're right. We know that. We have a really hard time finding facilities or places that would be appropriate to build that, staff to staff it, or money to fund it. So I just want to say that right off the front end. There are things that we'll do from this master plan. There are things we probably won't do. It's just a, it becomes a pick and choose sometimes when you don't have an unlimited money tree, right? So we'll move on to page two of this. Cliff Notes version you have, talk about program assessment. Yes, sir. Go back to your first page. Sorry about that.

Desired athletic facilities. Is pickleball on there?

Uh, pickleball is still on there. You can see 33% of the people that filled out the survey said desired facilities. Okay. Um, and we have, I would say, had we not done what we did with the 6 courts we build, it would have been way, way higher. Okay. Um, we're still, it's highly used. Um. Man, I'll be honest. If you go over there during this time at nighttime, you will see 100 kids over there nearly every night. It reminds me of the volleyball courts when I was growing up on Gallatin Road, how full they were at nighttime. So any other questions on this first page from anyone? Second page talks about program assessment. Excuse me, just saying.

Yes, sir. I apologize, Mayor, for not acknowledging your presence here. Is there anything on there that we need? Discuss.

No, you're fine. I sort of got distracted. I see what Steve was looking over there, and that was exactly what I was looking at, too, but we'll deal with that later. No, no, you're fine about the drainage. Oh, okay. I got you. I grew up over there.

Page two talks about our programs. This includes the programs like leagues, events, all the things that we offer. Why is this page important? It talks about, is your programming growing, maturing, or declining? And 71% of the programs that we offer are growing continuously. That's important because if it was all declining or maturing, we would look and say, yep, we've got enough soccer fields, we've got enough baseball fields, but we have to use this information to know that we are continuing to grow year over year in leagues that we run and leagues that other groups run. So that's what this page talks about. When you talk about mature leagues, you would look at something like our adult softball league that has stayed about the same number of teams for many years. When you talk about a growing league, you look at flag football who went from 300 kids to 750 over a 3 year time period. But then you get coed softball. We have not had coed softball since. I don't know before I was the parks director now, all of a sudden we had a thriving league in the spring and now we've got a lead coming back in the fall again. So it's very interesting. Some of the things that are coming back around again. Also. Any questions on the programming page?

Just one question. Yes, sir. I know the switch is very good as far as I'm concerned with the 1% decline. What is declining in our program?

One league that has declined a little bit is Friday Night Kickball.

Oh, yeah.

We used to have 10, 15 teams on Friday night, and it's really about four or five right now. A lot of the kickballers like to go to Metro Parks and play kickball because you can drink beer while you're playing kickball at Metro Parks, legally.

Yeah.

I'm just being honest. No, I appreciate that. Volleyball leagues and kickball leagues.

Okay.

I mean, I understand.

Okay, thank you for that.

Benchmarking. Okay, this is a little, this one, I wouldn't say it's controversial, but anytime you're comparing or trying to draw conclusions from benchmarking, It can be a little tricky, but here's what we have to understand. We are benchmarked off of the National Recreation and Park Association against cities that are 50,000 people to 99,999. We have, we could say 65-ish thousand, maybe even closer to 70. I don't know what we are right this minute. Okay, so I say that to say, We shouldn't be in the same quartile of funding as a 99,000 resident city, I wouldn't think. I think everybody would agree with that. I mean, I'm not going to argue for that, right? So same thing could be said for acres of parkland or full-time equivalent. I don't know what the magic number of where we need to be is, if it's the median or above the median or somewhere in there. I can't answer that question, but this is showing where we are in terms of those type comparisons. Here's what I do know. You can't really say that while we are a 65,000 resident city, our numbers of participation and visits to our parks are that of a higher resident city. I don't know if it's a 75,000 person city or an 80,000 person city, but if you look around us, And you can't compare us to Gullitsville, White House, Mount Juliet, Lebanon, places like that. And in terms of participation, because our soccer league's got 2,000 people, our flag football leagues have 700, baseball, 1,000.