Parks and Recreation chief lays out timetable for merger

The city's brand-new commissioner of an as-yet-nonexistent Department of Parks and Recreation told City Council yesterday that "most of the work" on the new agency needed to be completed by the end of this year.

Michael DiBerardinis said planning for the merger of the Fairmount Park Commission and the Recreation Department, mandated by voters in last November's charter-change ballot issue, had to move forward quickly so officials could prepare a unified operating budget next year.

The legislation requires the new department to be operational by July 2010.

"We are preparing to have most of the planning, thinking, and structuring complete by the end of the year," said DiBerardinis, former secretary of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and head of the city Recreation Department under Mayor Ed Rendell.

During hearings on Mayor Nutter's proposed 2010 budget for Fairmount Park, the Recreation Department, the Atwater Kent Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, DiBerardinis told Council members that community involvement was "imperative for the success of the merger."

"We have to spend time to listen and take in information relative to the hopes, the desires, and the needs related to the merger or we're not going to succeed," he said.

City residents, he added, "know a lot - they know what their problems are and they know what their needs are."

DiBerardinis made his remarks as Council considered Fairmount Park's proposed $12.6 million operating budget for next year.

Mark A. Focht, park executive director, said the budget enabled 171 full-time employees to manage and maintain Fairmount Park's 11,200 acres. Nutter's first park budget, proposed before the onset of the current banking crisis and global recession, came in at $15.7 million. The current budget amounts to a 20 percent reduction.

DiBerardinis said that merger of the park and the Recreation Department would be unlikely to produce significant savings through efficiencies, since many operations were combined prior to last November's ballot.

"There will be some savings, but I don't think it will be astronomical," DiBerardinis said. "The payoff here is we will have two powerful systems working together to take care of the city and [to run] programs in a way we haven't been able to do in the past.

". . . We have to perform to meet the demands of the [merger] legislation and to meet people's expectations."

Susan Slawson, recreation commissioner, presented a $40.8 million budget, down about 20 percent from Mayor Nutter's pre-recession proposal.

Similar 20 percent reductions were reflected in proposed city funding of the Art Museum ($2.4 million for next year) and the Atwater Kent Museum ($248,630).

In prepared remarks, Gail Harrity, the Art Museum's interim chief executive, noted that the museum had already eliminated 30 positions; reduced salaries 5 to 10 percent; cut marketing, education and outreach budgets; and even postponed exhibitions involving costly international loans - all in response to mounting recessionary pressures.

"The museum's staff reductions of this past February," she said, "were not a trimming of fat, but instead a cut into bone."