Parks and Recreation Committee - Regular Meeting

I caught over this meeting of the Parks and Rec Committee on this Monday, February 9. We will start with the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge We'll do roll call of membership starting at my left.

Katie Van Zeeland, District 5.

Patrick Hayden, District 7.

Alex Schultz, District 9. Denny Dougherty, District 15.

And for the record, Alder Smith is excused. We have the approval of the previous minutes from 12/08/2025. Is there a motion?

So moved. Second.

All those in favor? Aye. Those opposed? That passes unanimously. There are no public hearings or appearances. And we have no action items either. So we will get started with the informational items. That starts with twenty six-one hundred forty eight, the Grounds Division 2025 Annual Report.

Thank you, chair. I'm just having a moment here on the agenda and minutes. I'm just going through this real quick. Sorry for the little hiccup here. No.

Take your time. Alright.

Okay. Sorry about that. Thank you, chair. Tonight's pretty cool night for our department. We have some of the most talented, you know, managers that I feel in the city, our parks, recreation, and golf course divisions.

Annually, they do some some pretty remarkable things for the city and and the surrounding area as a whole. So tonight, we get to do a little bragging about what we've done over the last year and and, events and programs. So, with that, we have Greg Hoekstra, our grounds manager Jeff Plashert, our golf course superintendent and Nikki Wendt, our our recreation manager. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to to Greg, and he can tell you about how awesome we've been in the grounds division this year. And then any questions that you have, please along the way or or afterwards.

Alright. Thanks, Tom. Like Tom said, I'm Greg Oakeshter. I'm the grounds manager for the city. I'm gonna go through some of our contracted projects from 2025, some of our in house projects. And then the report also includes a lot of our annual responsibilities. A lot of the things we do are things that are repeated every year. We put soccer nets up, we take nets down, do we that

with

that

work

six grounds coordinators and three grounds technicians. One of the grounds technicians I share with Jeff. We have two grounds coordinators in each zone. We have three zones in the city. A zone out of our main office in Veterans Memorial Park, a zone out of the works out of Jeff's Maintenance Building, and a zone that works out of the Melvin Building over by in the vicinity of Pierce Park.

So we had two new grounds coordinators join the grounds division in 02/25 due to a retirement and an employee leaving. Both hires are working out nicely. Seasonal hiring for 2025 was similar to 2024. There were enough applicants to hire, but not a lot to be real choosy. 2025 started with a good skating season. We had seven weeks, and it ended with a really good skating season as well. This was the first time we were able to get the rinks up before Christmas in a decade. So that was always the goal when I started here. That was always kinda what we shot for us to try to get rinks up by Christmas break. And due to the weather, we haven't been able to do that for a while.

So I have two staff, and part of it is because I do have two staff that volunteer to work third shift during those first couple of cold nights, and you need that to really to really get them thick enough to withstand that that warm rain and weather we had later. Other challenges we had in 2025 is shoulder month staffing, mowing, litter, garbage, cleaning, ball diamond needs exceed our capabilities, especially in the spring until we get all our seasonal employees on board and trained in how to operate equipment in the different locations they're going to be moving mowing, then we finally do get caught up. And then another challenge is we're not drawing a real big candidate pool for full time or seasonal positions, like I said earlier on seasonals. But the past grounds coordinator positions only drew applicants in the teens. Years ago when I applied for this job, I can remember coming to council chambers and testing with like 45 people when there was positions like that open.

So that's really, really changed. But overall, we had a very smooth season without any accidents or injuries. And some of the projects that are included here are contracted projects. Some of these I have pictures for, start And next

And of the next fisherman's wharf there at Lower Tallulah. So we had them come

with back and do it again. They did another really poor job. So they came back this year and did it again. And then they also continued on in front of the hotel. There was some bad cottonwood roots growing through the trail there, and they they repaired that. And then the police department gate, the vehicle gate prematurely failed, but the company stood behind that and replaced it. And then some of the other contracted projects. Here's the new Lundgard Pavilion. So playground, concrete is in. The pavilion is ready to go.

We're just going to kind of wait this spring and hopefully really push the grass to get the grass established around the pavilion. We had some new additions at Highview Park in 2024. We put in a new playground at Highview Park. We did get some complaints from some of the neighbors that there wasn't enough things for smaller kids. So we reached out to Lee Recreation and had them propose a few more things and those were added in 2025.

The universal playground, the spinner was put in with a limiter. The limiter, they couldn't make the limiter work. Next we'll

next then

19. Of We of with port in place rubber. So now the strong spinner is in the limiter doesn't work but it is safe now because it has a bigger fall zone. Zone. Veterans Memorial Park, all the lot gates on the north side of the park were had all the lots had gates added to them.

This was for they had some impromptu car show sign show up that people were not reserving or letting us know giving special event permission to do it. So the PD wanted some gates to have some control over that. Schaeffer Kiwanis basketball courts were seal coated and striped. And then we do have some contracted services. We contract a company to do the police departments parking lot snow removal. Weed mowing in the commerce parks, we provide porta potties in the winter and in the summer in certain parks in the city. We'll get done. Done. Get get done. Done.

A doing. Of And And project project we we

We

have added a app to the Lutz Park boat launch. So now you can use your phone to pay for launching your boat there at the boat launch. We added bench presses at Pierce Park

done of work the

we've work work a right direction. Then next

are

can. We worked with forestry. They recommended which roots we could remove and then we put a light top dressing of soil over them and seeded it. And we will do that to a couple other sections this year in in the plaza. Wall diamonds, there's always lip work. The infield mix blows into the sand edge and the grass grows up through it and creates a creates a lip there. So there's always work for that. Two infields, we added seven tons each And go

back

grounds technicians was at a different city's ball diamonds, and he had saw that they had used, you can kinda see them in the background on the picture, erosion logs. So we have erosion logs around the inside of the infield, and that kinda keeps that infield mix on the fields rather than running off with the rain and plugging the storm drains. The entrance beds at the Scheig, we redid that, put some cortland steel edging in and planted some grass and some new plants there. Arbutus stairs had a bad heave after last winter. The technician corrected that.

Jones Park Family Rink was not very And then with next with with question. Next the with

slide.

Time to get a a we'll next

great Just some Lions Park had a slide left over from a previous playground installation that we didn't remove, and it finally had had some issues with it to the point where it couldn't be repaired. So it's removed. There's a spinner. I don't know why this thing's going on its own. Is that the signal I'm taking too long or what?

Alright. Bearing went out on a spinner that the staff replaced. Lundgard Park between Lundgard and Fire Station 6. There's a section of property there that we treated and worked up for what's that? Yeah. Yeah. Was a it was a prayer. I'm trying to think of who who sponsored that. Yeah. US Ventures sponsored and and worked on that project.

Vosters, when after they went into the Vosters woods and removed all the ash, we went back through there with a a pollinator mix. Staff was in there cutting out all the sweet clover flowers so that didn't go to seed. At our buta slide replacement, we replaced the poles at Fire Station 6. They had heaved the year before. We had some concrete work to do there yet. And then again, like I said, annual responsibilities of lots of different things. I'm not gonna go through them all here. You're welcome to read through them. And then we have collaborative and volunteer projects. We still work very tightly with the friends group at Scheig, which we could not do, keep the Scheig up to the standard it is without their help.

Very important for that. We coordinate workdays with some adopt a park groups. We to team. Team.

To the we have

team.

Certification for operating UTVs, so they got that.

And Myself and three other staff went and recertified with Wisconsin to be Wisconsin pesticide applicators. Everybody had general safety training and forklift training. The new members just had some chainsaw and tree felling training. And they always get a refresher on payloader in the fall because we don't run payloader at all, but that is what we use to load salts in the winter. So we always give the guys a refresher on that. And that's all I have.

Any questions on this report? Yes, Alder Schultz. Just

a couple

of quickies. Thinking about this last slide with adopt a park program, how many parks still remain unadopted? How is that program going? And then I understand we're maybe using that same model to do adopt a pawn program. Do you see that as being similarly successful when you compare it to the parks? I guess just some input on what those programs look like and how do we entice more organizations and citizens to get involved.

Adopt a park, I would say that we get a lot of one year adopt a parks. People are real gung ho on it and fizzle out the second year. I think we probably have about seven parks in adopt a park Typically, they reach out. They do our three or four litter stick pickups. If we can, we'll coordinate a playground mulching. That's always, you know, every year we top dress playgrounds. Well, you've worked on some of those yourself. So, stuff like that. An adopted trail, I don't think we have any adopt a ponds. I don't know if that's maybe a storm water. But we have some adopt a trails, same thing, where they're just litter picking and stick picking along a trail, stuff like that.

Thank you for that.

Any other questions? I get to have one other question. For the gates that were installed in Veterans Memorial Park, is this department in charge of deciding when to shut those? Or is that going to be more of the police department?

I wasn't in on all those conversations, but I'm assuming from what I've heard, it was the police department, yeah.

Thanks, Chair. The PD is in charge of using those gates as needed. The grounds crew would only close the gates if PD asked for some help.

Thank you. All right. Seeing no other questions, we'll move on to twenty six-one hundred forty nine, the Reed Golf Course 2025 Annual Report.

All right. Thank you for having me tonight and giving me a chance to talk about the 2025 year at the golf course. Hopefully you all had a chance to either read the report or see a few bullets on it. I just plan on touching on a few aspects of it because there is a lot of detail in there. Some of it could probably put you to sleep. First off, I want to talk about our staff from last year. You can only be as good as your staff is, and we've had really good staff the last few years. We really haven't had too many new faces. Our pro shop staff, they're the ones who check everyone in on a daily basis, take the tee times. They've all been there for three or four years.

Some of them have been there just as long as I have, ten, eleven years. So that's great for golfer familiarity. They take care of their own issues, and they also solve issues before they happen. As Greg mentioned, one of our long term golf course employees, city employees, Jim Peterson, he's the one with cake on the picture there. Retired in early May, and then we pilfered Brian from Greg's crew.

He worked out at the golf course for a long time, and he stepped in pretty quickly, learned golf operations, so we're still teaching him some new stuff. Throughout the year, we do some employee spotlights as well. It's good just for golfer interaction. We do have some slow periods from a marketing standpoint where we're just busy and the days just kind of run into each other. So it's nice to kind of keep on people's radar in the social media world to kind of show the personal side of the people that are working at the golf course.

So just kind of a broad overview of the golf course this year. It brought in just over $1,400,000 in revenue. That includes everything from golf operations. It also includes lease revenue from storm water, the cell phone tower, sorry, almost forgot about that one. Two cross country meets and then we do sell a little bit of advertising for the scorecard, which basically just offsets our costs and then some T sign advertising that helps promote some of our tournaments we have.

That said, it was about a 2.5% increase in revenue. On the expense side, we had just over $1,200,000 in expenses. That's about a 5% increase year to year. Most of that is just from spending more on car paving because that was about $110,000 that we didn't have the year before. Overall, to year, pretty similar when you factor in what we spent on capital improvements this year versus I'm sorry, in 2025 versus what we spent in 2024.

So again, another positive year for golf course operations, continue to put money into, our accounts for future improvements. And the golfers are really enjoying the improvements we're doing, and I'll touch on some of those in a minute. But how did we have such a good year? These are just some of the good stats here. Rounds increased by about a percent up to forty seven thousand four and fifty five.

I think that's about the twenty year high we've had at the golf course. Was about 2,000 when they were putting more through there. From a tee time perspective, we're basically filling almost every tee time in the day from 6AM to 7PM where our use rate we still have room for improvement. We can make all those tee times for people. There are still some gaps where we block things out just to help the golf course move, keep people's enjoyment level pretty high. The course was open for two thirty days. I'll touch on that again in a minute. We made a big increase in our revenue per round this year, about $0.67 per round. Multiply that by $47,000 that's where our increase in revenue comes from. Part of that is from having fewer pass sales.

So whenever you sell a pass, you get the money upfront, but then daily, they're not really giving you any money when they come in. So fewer pass holders in our mind isn't always bad because we're still selling those tee times to daily feed customers. But one of the big jumps we've had is cart usage. I was at finance committee a couple weeks ago talking about a new lease and getting additional carts, which was approved, so that'll help us out. But 62% of our rounds are riding rounds.

Where four years ago when we started tracking this, there was closer to 55%. So 2% to 3% increase every year. And that really helps with our revenues. Other than that, year to year was pretty similar except for the range used decreased a little bit. Part of that is the way we're operating it. It is kind of our biggest headache because it is landlocked. Balls kind of go all over the place. So we're closing it a little bit earlier. That's where we see the decline in revenue. But it's also less headaches for staff.

One of the things we really enjoy out there is junior golf and it's really just priming us for future success as well. As you can see on the right there, they set up a small mini golf course on the practice green, and Brian's doing some lessons. But the picture on the left doesn't show up great. It was probably one of my favorite pictures of the year. We were doing some irrigation repairs on Number 1 on a hot summer day and the kids were walking through there as we were recharging it. And the sprinkler had shut off right before they got there and they were disappointed. So we turned it back on so they could run through for a minute. Just little things like that and the kids love it. And we do see a lot of them on the golf course now. Going back to golf courses open for two thirty days.

If you remember in 2024, we opened on March 3. That was a long time before helping this year. But if you look at this chart up here on the right side, the six on the right, that is actually 2024, and you see a lot of dark greens. Those are over one inch rains per day. Those keep the carts locked up for the day, not able to access the golf cart. So this year, had 14 fewer cart restricted days. And on average, ballpark golf cart rentals bring in $1,500 to $2,000 a day. So it's easy to see how quickly bad weather can affect our operation. And some of those days where the dark there are dark greens, we're not even open. It just takes time for the water to drain off the golf course and be playable and safe for people.

Now we're just gonna move on to some projects that we did. 2025 saw the the grand opening or grand unveiling, guess, of the the refreshed clubhouse, which was new flooring, new paint scheme, brightened the place up quite a bit. Got good feedback on that. It was also a good time to bring our hole in one plaques from the golf course inside. Hole Number 6 was vandalized in the fall, would have needed to be replaced anyway, so we waited and just did it inside the clubhouse.

It's a great conversation piece for people after the rounds who have a hole in one. They definitely like to take people down the hallway. The big project this year was obviously paving of the car paths on Holes 10 through 14. It's not continuous, but they're around greens and tees. It was about 2,700 linear feet of path. Great improvement. We were able to keep the golf course open when the contractor prepped, that's on the left there. We did close the back nine for a couple days. While they we just couldn't efficiently or safely get golfers around, so we just decided to close. Then in the middle picture there, that's Brian.

Him and I were out restoring some of the edges of the car path this winter before it got really cold. And 2,700 feet times both sides is over a mile of cart path to restore. So we'll be doing that well into the spring here, but hopefully by the city tournament we're 100% back and ready. For grounds maintenance this year, it was a pretty quiet year overall. Less big rain events, two fixed bunkers.

Golf course was in great shape all year. The weather was very cooperative. We did have pretty high disease pressure for a few weeks in the middle of summer, but that's pretty Overall, course vandalism has been down lately. One thing we have seen a little bit, I don't have a picture of it, and I think it's from e bikes. They like to drive on the grass and kind of peel out quickly because I think a dirt bike would do more damage than an e bike.

So we've seen that in a few areas, but it kind of goes in waves. It seems like there's a group of people who might live in the neighborhood and then they have their fun for a few years and then they grow up and or move and it's quiet for a few years. So hopefully we're on a downward trend in that. Even from a golfer's perspective, less divots on greens, everything, was just a pretty good year overall. I put this up every year. It just kind of shows where we spend our labor on the ground side of things. On the bottom half of that chart is just our routine maintenance. That's about 70% of our labor. The 30% is just for projects. That gets skewed a little bit from weekends and holidays because we only go in there to set the golf course up.

So for routine maintenance, that's just mowing grass, changing the golf course setup, emptying garbages, stuff like that. Stuff we do on a day to day basis. And that really doesn't change from year to year. It may fluctuates like 3% either way. Moving on from there, we try to be more in the golf course when the weather permits. This year has not been too good for cross country skiing. Sliders have been okay. Cross country skiing just hasn't been great. Not a lot of snow. I don't think I've seen a fat tire bike out there yet this year. We are an urban wildlife habitat. As I was finishing up this presentation today, a bald eagle came swooping over the shop. That's always cool. Hadn't seen that in a probably a good year. We've also hosted a few city meetings.

We did a poetry workshop, I guess you'd call it, this year. That was something different. The mayor's hosted some open office hours over there. So we're trying to be more in the community than more than just the golf course. And to wrap up, obviously, we're a weekend of February here already, which is hard to believe. We're pretty much after this. We'll bore on to 2026. Most of our leagues are returning as far as I know. Some have asked for more tee time. So our clubhouse manager Brian's playing the game of how do we keep everybody happy and get more people on the golf course.

We already have an additional league coming out, hosting all the same tournaments we did last year. Most of our staff is returning, so we only have a few pieces to fill in there, which is good. All the business passes are coming back. And nothing really leads us to believe anything will be slowing down from a golf perspective. And we'll have any additional carts to rent. So hopefully it'll be a good year. And with that, do you have any questions?

Any questions? Yes, Alder Schulz.

Thanks, Chair. Thanks for the report. Always good to hear that the golf course is doing so well. Just curious to know, based on the information shared about the paving, some of the cart trails, is there anticipation of doing more as we progress here? And what's the target for paid versus not paved? Do you feel like you're getting close to that?

That's a good question and I don't have a great answer for you. But every year my staff takes on a couple new areas that we connect paths here and there. And our staff will continue to do that. We do have master plan that we're working towards, that we might be able to do some more paving in the future, depending on funds. And yeah. So we do wanna continue doing some paving where we feel like it's necessary.

So if you're having a decent year like this or repeated decent years, you can reinvest some of that funds into upgrading some of those paths around the course that helps basically helps move people around and also helps the course itself from degrading faster, correct?

Yes. And then the other thing I did not mention today is the pads we chose to pave are the ones that wash out in those heavy rains. So this year, didn't have to do a lot of it where 2024, we had to do it quite a bit. And that's the first thing we have to address because it's a safety issue. I can't have people rolling their ankles just walking from hole

at all.

Excellent. Thank you.

And I just wanted to add, I appreciate that you're keeping the golf course affordable since you're filling up all the tee times. It's a municipal course, so making available to everyone is, I think, something to be commendable or commended, especially since your financials are so strong. So thank you for that.

Thank you. One thing we've been talking about, and on this, one thing we've been saying is we offer a, we provide a good product at a good value, and seems it like that's our niche.

Excellent. We will move on to twenty six-one hundred fifty, the Recreation Division 2025 Annual Report.

Thank you. All right. First of all, yeah, just thank you for having us here. I'm excited to talk about the recreation division and give you guys an overview of just our programs, events, partnerships, and community impact overall. For those of you who know me, I love to talk about what I do, so these guys have said, keep it short.

So here we are. I'm going to assume you've read most things, so I, as Jeff did, am going to try to do my best to give you an overview. My report's categorized kind of to show a little bit of the areas that we focus on, and then I'm gonna touch on each one of those and just some highlights from each and how they've impacted us this year. So I will assume you've read this lovely message that I wrote, so we're gonna skip that part there. For me, I really wanna talk about our team.

So the progress that you guys are gonna see tonight really is a result of this group of people right here and their dedication and their talent to what they do. They genuinely care about the community, and it shows through the work that they do every single day. So you have myself as a recreation manager. We have Margaret, who's our marketing and community engagement coordinator. She's the one that does all the awesome social media stuff that you see, or if you see all of our branding and flyers and posters and stuff, that's her.

Leah is our customer service representative, and then we have three recreation supervisors with Liz, Jeff, and Carly. And then Laura is our recreation coordinator, so she is housed over at our studios in the Northland Mall overseeing our unity dance and acrobatics and some preschool and some enrichment program that we do. One of the things on this slide I wanted to talk about was we have 263 seasonal staff in 2025, and that's the most in the city for any division. We do a lot of work to make sure that we are creating the best job descriptions, having the best interview questions, trying to really recruit and retain the best staff that we can. I'll echo a little bit what Jeff was saying that, thankfully, we've had a lot of staff applying for our positions, and my staff has reported they're seeing that this year as well.

So I know we have I think we're up to 80 some percent returning aquatic staff, which is our largest group that we hire for the summer. So excited to have them back. 510 volunteers. That is probably the most in the city as well. A lot of those come from our youth sports coaches. We have four youth sports leagues, which I'll talk about. A lot of those are volunteer parents, but it's a substantial operational effort for us to have that many volunteers because they all have to apply online. They all have to have the background checks. We have to make sure that we're doing our proper diligence and making sure that we have the best people. So that work is absorbed by my team currently.

So it's just it's a lot. But having them and having them as part of our programs, we would not be able to operate our programs if we didn't have that many volunteers. So that's the most we've had since I've been here in eighteen years. So it's great to see that many people come in and wanting to be involved. Okay.

I feel it's important every year to just kind of talk about our strategic direction as a division. For us, it's important for me working with my team to just kind of identify some focus areas that we want to work on each year. Helps to just anticipate trends, gives us some direction, some accountability of what we're working on each year. So a couple of things that just wanted to highlight. We worked a lot with sponsorships in the last year and just navigating the management of that.

We've had a lot of businesses and organizations reach out in 2025 wanting to get involved with our programs and events and just be involved. So we're definitely seeing an increase in that. So trying to figure out and navigate how we're managing all of the sponsors and just donations in general that people have, which has been great, just as I put here, strengthening those relationships with businesses and organizations. We've worked a lot to enhance customer service this past year. Leah, who's our customer service rep, has done an amazing job working on efficiencies as she thinks of it from the customer lens and certain things like now we can book pool rentals online.

We were never able to do that before, and people are going to be able to renew and purchase their pool passes online. So just trying to think of that customer first. Worked a lot with the staff on leadership development as far as us as professionals and how we want to leave our legacy as a division and what are areas that we need to improve upon to be able to meet that legacy that we have in mind. A lot of stuff with seasonal training, seasonal staff training. Staff have worked a lot in this last this is kind of a three year strategic plan for this recreation emergency preparedness that they've done.

So thinking about our facilities where we're outside and what if something happens. Like, we have our soccer leagues at the USA Sports Complex. There are thousands of people there on a Saturday. What do we do if something happens? So working with our emergency preparedness coordinator for the city, having constant meetings with our staff to just work through what we feel is the best plan, how we're going to equip our staff to carry out those plans, and then just also working on health and wellness programs that just support the physical, social, and mental health of the community.

Marketing, this is Margaret's baby right here, all this stuff. So we have a huge social media presence. Facebook and Instagram are the ones that we tend to focus on. She does a lot of e newsletters. We just rebranded our newsletter this year to used to be called oh, I forgot what it was called.

Something with the fabulous five. But now we call it the up and coming newsletter. So basically, it gives top five things that we have coming up just to kind of let the community know events, programs, new programs that we have coming up that maybe didn't make our digital guide that we put out twice a year. Another big initiative of ours this year was we had to redo our website. So we are now technically housed under the city's website.

When the city got a new website, they felt it was important for us to jump on board with that. So, that was a lot of work with the staff, but that is up and running, which is great. And then just cross promotion within other city departments. There's a couple of us on our team that sit on the city's communication team, so working together collectively on how we help promote what everyone's doing in the city. All right.

The first program area I just want to hit on is early childhood. So our early childhood program is called our apple tots program. That takes place those classes, majority of them are at the Scheig Center out at Veterans Memorial Park, or we house them in the studios at the Northland Mall. We also have some in the summer, our Friday fun classes that take place at the parks and gets kids outside with different themes and stuff like that. So we had over, like, close to 700 participants in our early childhood program.

And things are going well. They were just over at the Shiag today because that is our temporary office for the rec division. And I was singing Frozen with them and doing all the things. So that's the benefit of us being housed over there in the short term during our remodels. We get to see all the things in action.

Youth activities for us, activities are a staple of what we do. I think a lot of parks and recreations would echo that it's important for us to continue to build up the youth and for us to provide the safe, inclusive space that's accessible to all of them. So we try to keep our programs at a low cost. We wanna have as many kids involved in as possible. We have programs that are free, like our open gym program that takes place at Ferber Elementary School, just open gym for them to come and just burn off some energy on Saturdays.

We have partnership programs. That would be our kids stage, Einstein project, and then YELL stands for our youth enrichment league. If you see the little girl on the top there, she's actually sewing. That was part of our project runway program, was teaching them fashion, and they were actually using sewing machines, which was cool. Our playground program is one of our staples.

That's been going on since the World War II era, so we always like to brag about that. And just has been a program that you guys have supported for years, and we're very grateful because that program allows kids to come and have access to social opportunities, gets them away from electronics and all the other daily distractions, and just lets them have fun in a nature filled setting, which would be in our parks. I'm excited because this year, we are having two new locations. So we're gonna be at Lundgard Park, which, you know, Greg had shown that new pavilion there. So we'll be transitioning our Vosters playground program over to Lundgard just for more access for more families.

And then we will be returning to City Park, which we have not been there, I think, since 2002. So we're going to try to focus a little bit on that downtown area, working with the schools, working with some of the neighborhood people there. There seems to be a high demand for a program in that area. So we're going to try that once again. Youth sports camps what we're seeing trends for youth sports camps a lot of our camps take place in the summer. I mean, all of them on here other than our youth volleyball camp are part of our summer programming. We're certainly seeing a trend with some of the racket sports. Tennis is losing a little bit. Pickleball is gaining momentum. We're also just trying to offer some different formats for 2026.

So instead of these camps taking place one day a week, we're gonna try weeklong camps where they come Monday through Thursday for a couple hours each day. It just helps the staff to have to not have to repeat everything that they did the week before. So we're hoping we can build on the skill development a little bit. But, yeah, 864 kids that we had in youth sports camps last summer. Our youth sports leagues I mean, our a league youth program is one of our largest youth programs that we have.

I know that a lot of communities recently have been shifting to a little bit more of the club based model for youth sports. I'm a firm believer that I think, as a municipality, it's healthy for us to have that grassroots league that emphasizes skill development, some of our core competencies that we have, the positive experience for everyone. So having over 2,500 kids in youth sports leagues for our community, I think, is pretty outstanding. And they continue to grow, so that's going to be something that we've tried to navigate with the staff that we have. But we're certainly finding we're reaching some limits with the staff we have, and we do not want to have to cap those programs.

But that might be a reality for us sooner than later. If we look at soccer alone, it has close to a thousand kids, and that's, you know, at least a thousand parents sending us emails and lots of questions. And but it's cool to see. So I don't have much else on the youth sports leagues. For our adult activities, this is an interesting one for us as we think about strategic planning because we are certainly seeing, as our population continues to age, we're seeing a lot of that population remaining more active than they have in the past.

So it's an area that I feel and I anticipate that it's going to grow in the near future. So there might be some opportunities for us for collaboration with other groups within the community. But a lot of the programs that we're offering right now, there's been a little shift in racket sports for the adults as well. Our tennis lessons have been down for adults, and pickleball continues to grow. So we'll see if that trend continues.

We've got a lot of enrichment opportunities with photography, some of our nature based programming. So, yeah, that's one that we continue to talk about as a staff of where the future leads for adult programming. Fitness and wellness. Fitness was down slightly just based on some intentional class adjustments that we made. Some of that is us transitioning over to the Scheig Center, bless you, for our division and having to offset some of them to the Northland Studios.

But overall, I mean, yoga seems to be our most popular for sure. We do have a strong partnership with the YMCA in the summer. We provide the park. They provide the instructor, and we get to do different classes as well. We've also created a new wellness series called Full Woman Rising. So that's experienced in early twenty twenty six, some excitement just from people wanting to do more of the wellness side of things from a holistic standpoint. So, yeah, fitness is strong. Excited to continue that. Unity Dance and Acrobatics, these are our studios that take place at the Northland Mall. In early twenty twenty five, we held our recital.

That was May within those days over at West High School. We had four performances with close to 700 participants, so lots of volunteers needed for that as well. I think we had about 75 volunteers with that. Acrobatics continues to be our largest genre. So we've just been working to see futuristically. I mean, acrobatics takes a lot of space. So how long until we outgrow the space that we're currently in? So having those conversations and future planning as well. But that program's been going very well, and Laura does a great job over there running those studios. So we're very lucky.

Aquatics. Aquatics was interesting for us this year because at the May, my recreation supervisor who oversees aquatics took another position. So that kind of fell into my lap, I was able to step in and do the aquatics for the summer, which allowed me to connect with staff and see things from a different perspective and just identify some opportunities for improvements and growth. So we're excited about some things that we have coming up. Staff was great this summer.

We did another staggered schedule where we opened Mead prior to opening herb, and then we left herb go a little bit longer than Mead, which seems to work out well. We are looking to implement a new program this summer called Sensory Swim. So we are working with a couple of groups in town, the Autism Society, a couple others on what that looks like, hosting families with children with special needs where there's less of a crowd. We don't play music. So working with them on what does that look like for our staff, what does that look like for their participants, and how do we set everyone up for success.

But trying to make things inclusive for everyone, and there's been a lot of great response to us implementing that this summer. So excited to see where that goes. I think another important thing on this slide is looking at our swim lessons. Over 2,000 people participating in what we consider to be an essential life skill with swim lessons and just allowing equitable access to our pools and swim lessons. We work with Fox Valley Even Start program to bring a group in during a special time and offer lessons to them at an affordable price.

So hoping to continue that trend this year. Special events, I mean, this is one of the favorite things that we do for me. It just brings people together, strengthens our community, allows us to build relationships with other organizations, businesses, allow for shared experiences within the community. It gives people a sense of pride. So we have events where we collaborate.

Like, I know we noted the toy ride along here, which we just partnered with the police department, fire department, and public works. So if you have not seen pictures from that, I suggest you go on our Facebook page because it's pretty cute. We have fundraising events, so our mom prom event is coming up this year. It's February 28. We raised about $12,000, which went directly to our fee waiver scholarship program, which allows us to allow children with financial burden to participate in programs such as swim lessons and youth sports leagues and other instructional programs.

So we're looking forward to continuing that. And then we have a lot of just external collaborations as well. Like, our largest special event is probably our US Venture Children's Week, where the beneficiaries for that are the Parks and Recreation, the Building for Kids, and the Appleton YMCA. So our groups work together on a committee to pull this off. We're grateful we just renewed our partnership with US Ventures, so they're in for the next three years as well, which allows us to continue to do this great program.

So, yeah, a lot of external collaborations and people that we get to work with for our events. As far as facilities, we have the Scheig Center that we operate. We had 107 rentals this year, a lot of them being wedding showers, baby showers, graduation parties, birthday parties, things like that. So continues to be a popular place. And then winter recreation, I know Greg kinda hit on this. Early twenty twenty five wasn't great. I think we're only open for actual skating rink for two days on our part as operations. I knew it kinda opened a little longer for just skating in general. But, as Greg said, the 2025 was awesome, and we're excited because we worked with Fox Valley Leadership Group to do a skate rental program. So they donated skates.

So we have all of these skates, and we just want people to come and use them and have that experience. So so we're grateful anytime that we get to be open a little bit longer for winter rec. As far as just community connections, I put a couple of slides up here that just showcases about how hard we work to foster different relationships with this local network of groups, whether it's the athletic organizations, school districts, internal and external groups. Really, what this does is it helps us be a resource so that if we don't have the staff or the equipment, we can still be creative in our programming. We can still think outside the box.

We don't have the funds to pull things off. And we just love it because it helps us just build trust and cohesion within the community. So couple of slides here just noting different groups that we work with. So, and that is all I have. Top picture here is our group that was marching in the parade for the playground program, and that was part of Children's Week. And their theme was kindness is our superpower. So they're all dressed in capes that they made for the parade. Questions? Any questions?

Yes, Audre Schulz. Got to get one in. Just curious to know how the skating opportunities at Pierce Park panned out this year so far. I know last year, as you say, was a pretty rough season where it was a couple of days and that was all.

So we do not staff the Pierce Rink, but I think Greg can probably comment his staff to that. I feel like the rink was open quite a bit this year. It's nice to have that cover.

Was up real early. The outdoor rink, you really concentrate hard on Jones. So when, like, those guys work at nights, they typically sat down there most of their nights and put water on Jones. So the the Pierce wasn't as thick when the warm weather came, so it it took a while to get back again. It is up it's up

Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it. It's in my neighborhood, I just haven't been over there to see how things are going over there. But I appreciate that it's an opportunity for people in my district to

Yeah.

It gets a lot of traction. Good to hear. Thank you.

And thank you guys for all you do. My family use your services all the time and and and the staff that you have does phenomenal job from top to bottom. Thank you and thank you everyone that does that work. I'll entertain unless there's any other questions, I'll entertain number eight.

Move to adjourn.

Second. There's been a motion and a second. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? That is unanimous. We are adjourned.