As new parks commission takes shape, former commissioners speak out

City implementing some key changes, aims for better environment

It’s been a year and a half since Forest Lake has had a parks, trails and lakes commission after five of the seven commissioners resigned over the span of less than a week. Now, the city is hoping to reinstate the commission with some modifications, in the hopes of seating a new commission this summer.

Feeling devalued

In late October 2022, a string of five commissioners resigned from the city’s parks, trails, and lakes commission. Then chair Terri Steenblock, Jason Steenblock, Karen Morehead, Bette Guyer, and Tim Garry all vacated their seats, leaving Doug Ramseth and Tim Miller as the only two left. At the same time, some restructuring of the commission was being considered by the city to include voices from the school district and from the Forest Lake Area Athletic Association, who utilize city parks for programming, most notably Fenway Park’s ballfields. So because of a lack of a majority present, meetings could no longer be held, and the decision was made to disband the commission until the city figured out its new commission structure.

But at the foundation of the resignations lied a general sense of feeling devalued, including by at least one who decided not to resign. Former commission members who resigned say their decisions stemmed from feeling like they couldn’t perform what they believed to be their citizen volunteer roles, and that their opinions weren’t valued, in part the council, but mostly city staff at the time.

“We feel like there’s a key role for this position because there needs to be community and citizen involvement in things of this nature, but we felt like the city, based on their actions and their words felt differently,” said Steenblock.

In particular, commissioners say former city administrator Patrick Casey was central to feeling devalued.

It was 2018, when Tim Miller joined the commission as a fairly new resident to town.

“I wanted to help out in any way I can. I wanted to give something back to the city I was going to make home,” he said, adding that was the reason he didn’t resign. “I still wanted to do that, and I felt the parks commission was important and has an important role, and I still do,” he said.

Miller, who was one of two who didn’t resign, said some members may have had “some misconceptions on what really our role was,” specifying he understood the role to be advisory in nature. But even still, it was Casey who seemed to devalue the commission, he said, adding he “really didn’t seem to value our input.”

One meeting Casey attended – which was a rare occurrence, Miller said – told the commission he was there out of courtesy as he had already gotten the item approved by council.

“When comments are made by the city administrator like that, it rubs people the wrong way,” Miller said, adding the comment “didn’t sit well with me.”

In other instances, the commission would make a decision and the administration would ignore their recommendations, which felt to Steenblock like further evidence the commission wasn’t valued.

The Beltz Park redevelopment plan and how the commission was treated was another point of frustration, former commissioners said. Several former commissioners, including Steenblock, noted the commission’s desire to keep up fencing due to the busy streets surrounding it, and to not install an irrigation system. Instead, plans were returned with the removal of a fence and the addition of an irrigation system.

“It would come back as something different,” Morehead said.

“It was like, ‘Ok, this completely contradicts,’” Steenblock said, saying it felt like staff was making those decisions.

She wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Former commissioner Tim Garry, who also resigned, spoke about that very issue at the Monday, March 18 workshop, citing the irrigation system as a prime example of how decisions were made contrary to the commission’s recommendations.

Guyer concurred, saying in an interview, “We’d make recommendations and sometimes they were taken, sometimes they were changed altogether, and we never got any feedback. ...We were told we weren’t even allowed to ask for feedback. If it gets changed by someone in administration, you’re operating in a deficit of information, so when the next thing comes up, you don’t have a better foundation.”

She later added, “It’s fine to be a recommendation only group. That’s not really the crux of the problem. It’s what happens to those recommendations and the information the commission has to make those recommendations.”

The conflict and points of friction was seen by Mayor Mara Bain and other council members, saying the body was “disappointed in the tone that had developed between staff and the parks commission.” She added she had conversations with Casey about the issue, and tried to get the commission back on track.

“I’m not sure at what point the Beltz Park project went off the rails, but there just became this divergence between what staff was recommending and what the direction of the parks commission wanted to go. That became an aggravating factor,” she said, adding staff is the “critical link” an effective commission and council. She said when staff and commissions pull in different directions, “it becomes very hard for the council to work effectively.”

Budget woes

One of the factors surrounding the Beltz Park project was the lack of funding, which Bain and community development director Abbi Wittman acknowledged.

The city has had a long history of using park dedication fees to pay for any park needs, including maintenance and upgrades. That hasn’t included any development of new parks, which park dedication fees are often used for.

In late 2020, Steenblock spoke critically of the city and council’s lack of funding, requesting a bigger budget and steady stream of revenue for parks. The council did allocate an increase in general levy funding since then.

But Steenblock said even after levy dollars started rolling in, there was a lack of transparency about budget dollars that continued to hinder the parks commission on successfully completing its work, saying there wasn’t information to go off of to make those decisions.

That frustration is echoed by other commission members.

“We didn’t know what moneys there were,” Morehead said, saying that in the past there had been a budget included at every monthly meeting of the parks commission.

Guyer, who had been on the commission for just over a year before her resignation, said, “We never were able to get our hands on regular, consistent budget data. So if you don’t understand your budget constraints, it’s really hard to look at what the parks need and make sound recommendations. And I didn’t understand why it was so hard for us to get that.”

Resignations

The key moment that lead to former commissioner Bette Guyer’s resignation was a meeting held to with all the city’s commissions during which she recalls being told the parks, trails and lakes commission’s job was to only make recommendations. She understood that to mean they weren’t allowed to ask questions or push back on final decisions. It felt to her at the time that she was being told to “sit down, shut up, and don’t ask any questions,” she said, recalling questioning the purpose of the commission.

“It kind of felt like our role is the party planning, which I like to do, but that’s not a commission role,” she said. “I really started to question our value.”

Morehead had the same thought after that meeting, saying it felt to her like she was being told to “let the city take over.”

Other issues plagued different members. For Morehead, it was a general sense nothing was being accomplished, and community members’ concerns couldn’t be addressed.

“I never felt I could represent the community because the community was never listened to,” she said.

Steenblock listed other concerns about the park’s finances, including being asked to blindly approve park dedication fees, and a desire for better interdepartmental communication and transparency, particularly with the public works and maintenance staff’s use of park funds.

Over the course of a few days in late October 2023, five commissioners submitted their resignations.

“It just broke my heart,” said Morehead.

Guyer emphasized the five who resigned didn’t do so as a group.

“We didn’t get together and talk each other into it. We were coming into that same decision on our own,” she said.

Miller said he never considered resigning, saying he “didn’t think there was enough negative to me to warrant” a resignation.

Silence

Since their resignations and the ultimate closure of the commission, members who resigned have expressed the desire to share their frustrations in person with council and staff.

The silence afterwards felt deafening, some said, and telling.

“I still to this day don’t understand why [they didn’t contact me], and if not me, why not Terri, and if not Terri, why not Bette?” Morehead said.

Guyer added, “We got a thank you for helping … but nobody cared enough to check in, sit down and talk this through and get more information. I thought that was telling, as well.”

But the day the city received the resignations, Wittman said she was expressly told by Casey to not contact the former commission members. She did talk briefly with Morehead shortly after the resignations came in, despite being told not to.

Bain said she felt that asking former volunteer commissioners to meet wasn’t respectful to their decision to resign, and also felt the detailed resignation letters gave her the information she felt was needed to help resolve the issues.

At the Monday, April 15 workshop, however, the continued voicing of frustrations from former commission members at past meetings – and that particular meeting – had changed her mind and she voiced a desire to meet with the those who resigned and hear their concerns, “because I think there’s information that needs to be shared and certainly wanting to be shared.”

Hope and change

One of the biggest and most obvious changes that has been made since the commission’s last meeting in October of 2022 is the council’s decision to fire Casey and search for a new administrator, which Guyer took as a positive step, though she encouraged the council to take a look at the culture at the city.

“Maybe a new person would help, maybe a new person would fall back into the same pattern,” she said. “But I’d say there’s hope.”

Bain recognized hiring the right city administrator will be a critical piece to the success of a new commission.

The parks, trails and lakes Commission began in June of 2015 after a change from a previous parks board, which operated differently than a commission. The reason for the change came because the council, lead by then Mayor Stev Stegner, wanted more control over the spending of park dedication dollars, which the board had the ability to spend prior to the change.

Wanting to get the correct structure and intent right for a new commission, Bain said “We need to be thoughtful of what hasn’t served us well and make sure we’ve got the structures in place to make these improvements and to have an effective commission going forward,” she said.

The future parks commission, the new official name of which has yet to be decided, will include its typical seven voting members appointed by council, but will now include non-voting members representing the Forest Lake Area School District and the Forest Lake Area Athletic Association.

Also key to the transition for a new commission will be working closely alongside the council throughout 2024, said Wittman.

“I think we are trying to find ways to pull those two bodies close together to make sure they’re well aligned with foundational information,” she said. The plan is to have an improved onboarding system in place, and that the council set the commission’s agenda and goals through the rest of the year. That idea was taken positively by Steenblock.

Wittman would also like to create improved communication between the parks and maintenance departments. She said that the current structure is a dual-managed system, with community development and public works tag-teaming parks endeavors.

“I don’t doubt that that led to some of the challenges and the feeling of a lack of support,” she said.

Wittman only had five months with the parks, trails and lakes commission before its last meeting, so she didn’t have much runway to analyze the commission’s structure. Still, she hopes establishing standardized procedures similar to the city’s planning commission will help the new parks commission have clearly defined roles, particularly around when the commission has outright authority and when they are an advisory body.

But she acknowledged a major key to a new parks commission is setting a budget from levy dollars.

“A lot of what’s in our capital plan, it’s deferred. It’s playgrounds that are 25 years old. We’re not even necessarily talking about money for new shiny things…it’s upgrades to equipment and benches that are well past their prime,” Wittman said.

Adding more dollars to the parks fund is something former commission members still hope to see. Miller said that if there’s one thing that would help a new commission the most, it’s giving the members a budget and “not have the parks just be the secondary thought.”

Miller added, “We look at comparison in looking at other cities, and what they’re able to do. For most of my term on the commission, we didn’t have a budget…we were simply working from park dedication funds and that was it. I think it’s important for the community to have the parks, the trails, and of course with us, it’s the lakes, too, and have that component and have some semblance of importance, and in order for that to be the case, you have to have a budget.”

How the changes might be effective is obviously to be seen, but Wittman hopes the work she has done so far, and further conversations between council members and former commission members can lead to an improved environment for the new parks commission.

“The rest of 2024 is a foundation-building time and I’m hopeful that in rebuilding that team … it’ll be an improved system for Forest Lake,” Wittman said.

The city is getting close to filling its a new commission, though there are still more applicants needed to do so. The hope, Wittman said, is to seat a new commission by early to mid-summer.

Out of the seven former commission members, just one – Doug Ramseth, who also never resigned – has indicated he’d like to return to the new commission to city staff. Guyer said she might consider it, but would have to make sure she has a “really clear understanding of what the purpose of the commission is and what the guide rails are.”

Morehead said if she saw the right changes, she’d want to join again, but still feels her time is over.

“Never say never, but right now, no,” Morehead said. “They need a new start, not bringing up any of the old, and I’m afraid I don’t have the capacity sometimes to let go.”

Miller, one of the two who didn’t resign, said he now wants to dedicate more time to his family.