Good evening, everybody. Today is
well, ma'am, are you ready
May thirteenth, 2026. This is a meeting of regular meeting of the recreation advisory board. Madam clerk, could you please call
Chairman Sine. Present. Vice chair Sanchez.
Councilwoman Barre is absent. General Lafayette. Present. Kenneth Phillips is absent. We have three present and two absent.
Alright. Before we begin, I want to recognize our vice chair
on the occasion of his birthday.
He is dedicating, you know, his time here in City Hall. He is a selfless public servant, and we appreciate being here on
your birthday. Thank you, chairman. Appreciate it. Birthday to you. Thank you.
I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. So we had it's been a few months now since we came together. We are missing one of our members for short too.
But since we last met, the mayor's budget has been proposed for well, the entire budget has been proposed, but also in particular, we're gonna be spending some time looking at the recreation department budget tonight. We will do a review of programming on basketball and soccer is currently underway, basketball is done, and then summer programming, is coming up. It's an update on the facilities, open up for any public comment, and we'll go from there. Does anybody have any thoughts or anything else I wanna not add to the agenda because it's been publicized already, but alright. Great.
Director, we will turn it over to you for an initial presentation on the on the mayor's proposed budget and your budget. And we are always blessed
our director and deputy directors here. Appreciate all your work as always and looking forward to hearing more.
We appreciate you as well. It feels like a beige of booze, so to speak, with being in front of Councilman Sanchez with his budget. But the budget that was proposed has been pretty much status quo as it was last year. It has
And for your so for personnel, are you fully staffed up at this point, director, or are there where where are you in terms of staffing?
We do have an additional position that's in here, recreation specialists, as well as the director of Elwood Community Center is also. Those are new, right? Right. Right.
But are you fully staffed up now? Are there any full invasives in advance then?
So the Westin assistant director position is being posted as well. But those are positions that are already under budget. Right. Yeah, right. I'm sorry.
No, those are vacant spots right now. Are those the only ones you have vacant? The West End deputy director position? West End, Elwood director,
and the recreation specialist. That was a good position. Okay.
Yeah. And I think the budget's pretty status quo, basically the same as that came from last year. Do you, in your programming budget last year, did that about meet the needs of the department?
Think we still have a decent amount in the programming budget for last year. I mean, it's a budget that obviously I inherited six months in. But it is a budget that I've been able to work with, with the team. David, Jackie, everybody's been great in terms of helping navigate through that existing budget.
So within the existing programming budget then, are you thinking is there anything that you're thinking about switching around? Is there more money that would go towards, like, basketball and soccer or soccer and basketball? Or is there Well,
we have some areas that we definitely would like to address, certainly given well, soccer has always been very popular. But given the increased popularity of soccer and with what's coming to the region, it's been it's an important focus of ours to create more of a developmental program for soccer, to get our youth more interested in soccer, exposing them to the sport too as well. It's not a programming area that's been necessarily a focal point for recreation in the past, but certainly something that we need to be very mindful of, very involved with. It's a huge sport. So that would be a key area as far as programming to focus on.
I'm interested in the recreation director, the new role, is that what it's called? The new one you're creating?
Specialist, yes. Is that to oversee extended soccer leagues or little leagues? Or what's the goal, the intent of that role?
Well, felt a heightened need to look at our data capturing, work with our data, because I think that was strengthening us in terms of developing new programming to look at what we've done in the past, what works, what doesn't work. To have a strong person that could be focused on data would be certainly a key area for the mentoring specialist but it's somebody to fill a lot of voids or fill some of the voids within the operations from the main office standpoint.
Okay. Did you have anything that came up
no. A couple of things came up in the budget committee. The first one was there's a lot of curiosity from counselors regarding on enrollment for summer camp and summer jobs. The department didn't have like the waitlist numbers at the time, but they did provide it to us a few days after. And it's good to see that it's in this packet.
Because I was personally speaking, I think we need to be doing everything that we can to have a spot available for anyone that wants to participate in, especially in summer camps. I mean, this is a very affordable, very meaningful opportunity for a lot of families. So on 2026 summer camps page, you see the total enrollment right now is four sixty one and there's almost 300 kids on wait list. So, I mean, I think it's our responsibility to try to, you know, expand capacity, maybe not all two sixty eight at once, but when we're providing the exact same amount in funding and seasonal staff and program expenses, it kind of shows that we're not
moving in that direction. Which number are you reflecting on?
I'm speaking on the twenty twenty six sports camps enrollment.
Well, I'm glad you pointed that out because that significant waitlist total is as a result of the fact that we don't have access to PCPTA this summer. Where in the past that has been a facility that the recluse used for that sports camp program, which is somewhat sad to see that we're not able to maintain the normal capacity with that sports camp because that is a program that's very important to our youth in the city of Providence. It's something that there's been a lot of legacy youth that go to the sports camp year in, year out. However, as I said, we do not have the ability to use PCTA this summer if we're using a Hope High And
that was Hope not able to accommodate the same amount of student the same amount of kids that PCTA I mean, are the have we gone to the colleges to see if they might be willing to open up their field houses or anything like that?
There's been we've had some conversations and we certainly have some relations with some colleges, but they have their own programming that's going on. It would be
Yeah, know it's like as soon
they Maintain ongoing sports camp program like this without it being broken up into segments. It would be kind of bits and pieces in terms of finding facilities to use that way. As opposed to we have PCTA, we can utilize it throughout. Think what How many courts are you getting? Yes.
really good three courts in there. There's a track inside that. Yeah. There's a, you know, there's a I think there's the the long jump and triple jump hit in there as well so it's really all encompassing. That's why we're able to offer a larger amount of allotment for for for each of those sports camp that will rotate on a weekly basis.
So one week is gonna be track and field, it will be basketball. So we're able to have 150 kids in BCTA whereas hope with some of the HVAC issues that we're having kind of happening in that building makes it very difficult for our kids and we have gotten other complaints from parents and concerns about just the space itself and that's something that you know we're talking to public property, PPSD facilities and purchasing to see what we can do for our contingency to make sure that we have a cooling area that will suffice it we're not able to get PCTA. So
