Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake wants to conduct a nationwide search for a new director of Recreation and Parks. She shouldn’t bother.

The department has changed directors 15 times since the mid 1980s, with an average tenure of only about 2.2 years. A person who served in that position a few years ago, in a moment of thoughtless exuberance, said she wanted to hang framed photographs of all department’s directors on a wall at the Jones Building, the central headquarters for the department.

After some reflection, the idea was dropped, as much for the embarrassment it would bring to the city – all those visitors to the Jones Building admiring, with increasing bewilderment, how it came to be that there were so many directors of the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks.

Three of them were recognized professionals in the field of recreation and parks.

One, Dr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, for whom the Jones Building is named, was appointed by Mayor Kurt Schmoke. Dr. Jones came from the academic side of the profession, and was highly respected by his peers throughout the country. He had been a professor at the University of Baltimore. His most striking quality was his exuberance for his profession. His father had been the founding President of Grambling University.

Unfortunately, Dr. Jones died after about six months on the job. He was my friend and the only person I knew in Baltimore before moving to the city.

Roll Call of Fallen Directors

Then along came Marvin Billups, also a friend of mine from our days of working together in Georgia in the 1970s. At the time of his dismissal by the O’Malley administration, he was president of the National Recreation and Parks Association.

To say that he was a good, honorable, and distinguished professional would be spot on. He knew the business by the book and in practice. His termination was summary and without explanation.

It was thought he could not manage the department’s mounting 311 complaints, a cornerstone of then-Mayor Martin O’Malley’s CitiStat program. I know he was still in a state of disbelief when he was let go. For a person of his stature in the profession, and one who possessed a very orderly mind, he could not grasp how to navigate in the alternate universe that is Baltimore’s government culture.

Lastly, and most recently, was Greg Bayor. He, too, was a professional with an excellent resume who had served in both sides of the profession, recreation and parks.

And he knew the city, having served as an employee of the Parks Bureau in the 1970s. He liked Baltimore and wanted to rebuild the department – and, more important, he knew how to do it.

I advised him to quit because the mayor would not allow him to have a deputy director. My concern was for his health. And I recognized early on that the Rawlings-Blake administration didn’t respect him; his advice and recommended solutions to the department’s mounting problems were discounted early on.

Director Bayor rarely complained and always tried to follow the directions of City Hall. He met privately with the mayor only twice during the two years he served as director. Finally he accepted an offer to direct Tampa’s recreation and parks department.

Deciding a Role for Rec

Here’s my point. No director is needed until the administration makes up its mind about the role public recreation will play in Baltimore, or as a trusted and wise friend of mine says, “what is the administration’s vision and what resources are they willing to put on the table?”

Right now, as I write this we don’t know. I am not suggesting we need a position paper on this subject, but we are getting close to that point.

Here is my perspective based on nearly 30 years of research and involvement in the field of urban recreation.

Baltimore public recreation is a life-saving proposition. If that assertion is doubted, drop into the Parks and People Foundation during enrollment days for its summer Super Camp. Look at the faces of the moms and dads enrolling their kids. These people – the working people who want something really special for their kids ­– arrive to make book, they aren’t shopping for a cheer-leading camp.

Call it moral absolutism, if you will, but these parents know what is the right way and a wrong way for a kid to spend a summer in Baltimore. The distinction is not subtle: it can be a matter of life or death.

Which brings us to swimming pools. The working class of people in Baltimore – let’s be clear about this – are who I am referring to here, not those of us who can afford to belong to private swim clubs.

The Importance of City Pools

There are thousands of families who need the city’s pools. Their worries, concerns and interests do not coincide with those of the good people of Mount Washington, where I once lived, many of whom have the luxury of thinking about pool behavior from the perspective of parents with the services of a nanny.

The working class depend on a public pool system to satisfy their kids desire to “get wet.” Swimming pools in a city are the cornerstone of summer urban recreation.

And learning to swim gives any kid – from Mount Washington to Druid Hill Park – three things. First, it might save the youngster’s life or someone else’s life someday. Second, it can help the youngster develop and habituate a positive recreation life style all their lives. And third, it might, just possibly, help that child someday win an Olympic medal.

The youngsters in Mount Vernon can learn all these things at a private pool.

Can the administration even begin to explain why it would not provide the same opportunities for the other kids in Baltimore?

If this explanation cannot be satisfactorily made to the citizens of the city, then what will the administration tell the candidates for director of parks and recreation?

Keeping Kids Safe

Permit me to be more fundamental, have there been no moral lessons learned from our nation’s long struggle to equalize educational opportunities?

Do we want our kids to grow up recreationally illiterate?

What about the simple notion of keeping a kid safe? It is a very short distance from a city pool to a drug corner for ordinary kids in Baltimore.

So what is the missing active ingredient? Doesn’t the administration believe, really believe, that in a city like Baltimore that all aspects of public recreation, if done well, can influence for the good all else we do, all aspects of society in Baltimore? That recreation in our city is consequential, even life-saving, on a daily basis?

Until there is a reformation of the minds in City Hall, until the people who govern us believe that public recreation in Baltimore is about saving lives, developing good habits, and potentially winning an Olympic medal, there is no need for professional director.

Hire a management consulting firm and disassemble the department in an orderly fashion. You don’t need to search countrywide for a director to do that.

Maybe it it is an appropriate time for Rawlings-Blake to put into calls to other mayors of large cities.

Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, who is also a close personal friend of Councilman Robert Curran, comes to mind immediately. Philadelphia has been undergoing substantial changes in recreation and parks since 2003, including revisions to its charter.

They have unified the recreation and parks components into one agency, and substantially empowered its citizens to assist in governing the new department.

And, of course, they have financial stress, too, but it is interesting to look at the Philadelphia Parks Alliance site to see how vigorous, organized and united the citizens have become in Philly in support of the new system.

We can do it.

I will write about the parks’ side of parks and recreation in a later column.

– Chris Delaporte was Baltimore’s Recreation and Parks Director in the 1980s under Mayor William Donald Schaefer, interim Chief of the Parks Bureau under Mayor Martin O’Malley and, most recently, a member of the Recreation and Parks Advisory Board. He was a co-founder of the Parks & People Foundation and serves as the city’s Park Advocate. He can be reached at theparkadvocate@gmail.com.